Fully agree but as usual it was more complicated than this even. Losing controls and instruments in IMC conditions could mean you're straight and level with many minutes to troubleshoot and try things off book, or maybe another attitude like a graveyard spiral towards the deck with seconds to decide. We might not have all the details to armchair fly it.

He didn’t lose the controls _or_ the instruments. He lost his HUD and the primary flight display. But the standby instrument display was still working correctly, and the fly–by–wire system was still accepting input and acting on it correctly. Sure, if those things had failed then ejecting would have been fine. But he didn’t even check them to see if they were still working or not, he just bailed out of a flyable plane.

I wonder how many planes they will lose if they trained the pilots to fly without HUD.

I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I've seen too many software systems that failed in undetectable ways, and the user was disbelieved. The damn thing is fly-by-wire and if the instruments are failing for unknown reasons, then I could easily believe that the controls started glitching too, and that this isn't reflected anywhere.

Interesting because I'm willing to give the US Marine Corp, which conducted a comprehensive investigation before firing him, the benefit of the doubt.

You're free to do that, but I'm not sure that this is the best thing in the world. Of the people who I know who were in the US military, generally the more highly placed they were, the less faith they had in the command structure.

> instead of penalizing him

He wasn’t disciplined. But he was penalised. Which strikes me as the right balance given the facts.

There are two kinds of jobs: those where the person’s employment is more important than their work, and those where it isn’t. This is the latter. He’s still getting paid. But he should not have this responsibility. It you’re making excuses after losing a plane when you shouldn’t have, because you were following bad instructions, you should not have an operational command.

I’d argue that this is exactly who you want testing potentially malfunctioning planes? The alternative leads to jocks crashing into the runway when they desperately try to control a runaway plane.

I disagree, penalising people for making mistakes where procedures are bad tends to cover up root causes and causes more problems in the long term.

After all, its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?

> its not like flying planes is a new phenomenom. Why were the procedures still bad after all this time?

It’s a new plane!

Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering. That’s not appropriate for a mission critical role.

> Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering.

Huh, is that a specific thing for military pilots? Just watched the latest MentourPilot's video and there the french equivalent of the FAA found that the pilots were told to improvise too much, and should have followed the procedures better.

Isn't this a catch22 with hindsight based judgement?

Somewhere in the middle. You don't want to turn your brain off and bail out of a perfectly good airplane, but at the same time if the very first step of the checklist says “LAND ASAP” in giant red letters then maybe you should just divert to your alternate and land.

The prime rule, which supersedes all others, is to not have shit go wrong. That's more important than following any of the other rules; if you follow all the other rules, the rules which you think are important because they're written down, but miss on the prime rule, then your ass is in trouble. Even if it doesn't end your career, it will still hurt it.

When things really matter the foremost objective is never "follow the rules so your ass is covered", it's to not have a situation where that ass covering is relevant in the first place. Outcomes matter more than preforming according to the book.

>It’s a new plane!

The F-35B has been operational with the US Marie Corps since June 2015.

Which makes it a new plane, considering the same organization flies planes from the 1950s too.

> Also, a pilot blaming procedure for a bad call is ass covering

Ultimately pilots are humans, being asked to make split second decisions. A certain percent of the time decisions are going to be bad. That is why we have procedures. In pretty much every other field we recognize that. Ignoring that fact is incompetence on the part of military command.

There are of course situations that cannot be covered by procedures, however this doesn't seem like one of them.

Do you think there is no value in picking pilots that make the correct split second decisions or screening out pilots that don't?

The priority here is combat effectiveness, not job security for pilots.

On top of all this, they found that he didn't follow the correct procedures that did exist!

Yup. Some humans make okay split-second decisions. Some make great ones. That this difference is unfair is irrelevant. Nobody should be entitled to be a commander.

Oh, i think there is tremendous value in that if you can do it. However i don't think humans work that way, and what is really happening is survivorship bias. This reduces combat effectiveness as it sweeps opportunity for organizational improvement under the rug.

As a civilian, I would have expected that if there's anywhere where you're supposed to follow protocol even if it means expensive mistakes happen, it's the Marines. My mental model of the military, and especially the Marines, is that it's an organization that values discipline and prioritizes following the chain of command.

That's even more true if getting it wrong means you could die.

A pilot is expected to follow procedure when that's called for but ultimately has full responsibility and can make any call they want. Procedure is never going to cover the range of scenarios you can run against and there's no time to reach out to the chain of command when something goes wrong.

Ejecting could save you but send the plane crashing into a city, and that's just one of many scenarios.

If he was flying with instruments in bad weather and felt that he could not trust those instruments that seems like a good reason to eject since you can easily end up in the ground or a mountain. I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not. Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems. That said, there was a real failure that seems to have happened at the worst possible times.

At the end of the day, the bar is set really high for someone in this position.

> Maybe he wasn't familiar enough with the airplane's systems

It seems that a highly qualified marine test pilot is unlikely to be unfamiliar with the airplane's systems

He has less than 50 hours in that type.

Until you get to actually fly it for real, you read the manuals a few times over, do countless hours in the simulator and so on.

Those 50 hours can be misleading as to his experience with the aircraft.

A stimulator comfortably positioned at FL000 is much more amenable to troubleshooting multiple electrical failures than a tin can balancing on computer-controlled thrust differentiating, 1900 feet in the air well below stall speed.

You are missing the point. Incidents do happen, but you just don't get to fly a fighter jet until you proved in a simulator that you are capable of flying it and troubleshooting it. What the simulator does is to see if you can be entrusted with the aircraft.

Yes, but decades of experience have shown that pilots are far braver and willing to risk their skin in a simulator than they are in the air. And for good reason.

> I don't know if switching modes like he did was standard procedure and if the resulting failure was unusual or not.

Pilot switched mode back to normal flight because it was the switch to landing mode is what caused his HUD and PFD to turn off in the first place.

I don’t know about the US marines,

But I served three years in the Swedish army and wasn’t taught to obediently follow command when it makes no sense. I was taught to disobey illegal orders.

I can’t imagine a fighter pilot has so little authority over their actions like you describe.

That's because you're a civilian and you don't understand how Naval Aviation works. Reading straight from the NATOPS manual for my old aircraft: "It provides the best available operating instructions for most circumstances, but no manual is a substitute for sound judgement. Operational necessity may require modification of the procedures contained herein."

Aviators are not expected to be checklist-executing drones who "follow protocol." They are expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of their aircraft's systems so that they know when to follow procedure, what the procedures are designed to do, and what to do when they have a situation where the existing procedures don't apply or conflict with each other.

In my old community, it was a commonplace occurrence when requalifying in the simulator for instructors to deliberately insert situations involving multiple malfunctions whose emergency procedures conflicted with each other, such that blindly "following protocol" would cause you to die.

Actually, the US military is successful more because they prioritize on the spot thinking and only deferring to the chain of command in specific circumstances. As much authority is pushed downwards to the lowest level possible. That’s why the military is so effective tactically, though the high level strategy lately has been rough. The war on terror was overall ineffective, for example, but the troops had a ridiculous k/d ratio. Another part of the success is from training. There aren’t many militaries who train as much as the US military.

That’s true if it’s the same organization doing both things. In the case of aircraft accidents, we deliberately separate out the investigators from everyone else precisely to avoid that problem. The investigators make recommendations for actions that should be taken to prevent future incidents of the same type. Firing the pilot doesn’t accomplish that, so the investigators didn’t recommend it. That doesn’t mean that firing the pilot is inappropriate though, only that doing that wouldn’t prevent future accidents of this type.

The procedures are never finished. They’ll be updated as needed for as long as anyone flies the airplane. The final revision could be a century or more from now, long after the airplane is out of active service. The updates it receives in that time depend on what accidents happen during that time, as well as how the systems change during that time.

The procedures were not bad, they were ambiguous: I think most pilots understand what “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“ means (that they should check if the plane responds to basic controls like pitch, roll and yaw before ejecting), but it leaves room to wiggle out of your responsibility by saying that you misunderstood this statement. And if someone is willing to do that, you might conclude that he is not a good fit for a leadership role...

Lots of armchair admirals in here, but as a former naval officer your answer is the correct one. The pilot should have tried the flight controls, if I had abandoned ship because my displays turned off but we could still control the helm, I’d be drummed out too.

I think this comment helps to contextualize the decision in a balanced fashion. If you just read the article probably you come to the conclusion that he should not have been relieved. This helps explain why he was relieved

> It’s a new plane!

First flown in 2006. Introduced 2016.

This project needs scrapped. They tried to make it everything for everyone. Not practical. No danger of retiring the stalwarts anytime soon.

You have a good point in that it was supposed to replace all kinds of aircraft. It was kind of its thing. I haven’t been following too closely but it’s had issues filling all the roles.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program

It's a little too late for that. The JSF program probably should have been cancelled or completely restructured circa 1996. But now there's no remaining alternative. The inventory of legacy AV-8, F-16, and A-10 aircraft are going to be retired no matter what because they're literally falling apart and it's impossible to keep extending their service lives.

> and it's impossible to keep extending their service lives.

B52 projected to last till 2050

B-52s aren't subject to the same stress as fighter aircraft are, that's why they are able to keep flying for so long (among other reasons).

You can build five F-18s for the price of one F-35.

Wrong. The current unit cost for an F-35B is about $109M while an F/A-18E/F is about $55M. That's a difference of 2×, not 5×. And more importantly, the F/A-18 can't operate from amphibious ships to support Marine Corps ground forces. If it can't accomplish the required mission then the cost is moot.

https://breakingdefense.com/2023/10/newest-f-35-f-15ex-contr...

It's disappointing to see people post lazy, low-effort comments like this without bothering to do even basic fact checking.

It's extremely practical and a good aircraft. Not to mention cheap, now that the development costs are paid for.

There is no aircraft in history that did not have hiccups during procurement. Even "ol reliable" platforms like the Blackhawk or the F-16 had much worse reputations when they were first introduced.

That’s a good way of putting it.

Were the people who wrote the manual penalized? Should they continue to write manuals?

Hopefully thrust as well

Thrust is important but actually secondary to steering. You don’t necessarily bail right away if you lose thrust because you could still be able to glide to somewhere you can land. You might also be able to fix the problem. Of course if you’re already at low altitude or you’re in bad weather then you might not have a lot of time to try such things, but the rest of the time you do.

Fighter planes don't really glide, do they?

They gilde better than the space shuttle and that got deadsticked every time it got flown (well, almost every time).

The aerodynamic properties make both high speeds possible while retaining maneuverability at low speeds tend to lend themselves well to decent (for a jet) glide performance. What they trade off is stability.

I'm not a pilot, but a plane can be landed without propulsion.

Not these fighter planes. They literally need both the propulsion and an active flight computer to fly stably. Without the flight computer, they are uncontrollable. Think balancing a pencil on your finger - if your finger is immobilized or loses control, that pencil will fall almost immediately. The plane's controls are much more complex and unforgiving.

And without propulsion, they are just flying rocks. No gliding.

No. As long as it has electrical power and the flight controls are working it can remain stable and glide even with a complete engine failure. Of course the glide ratio is fairly low but it's totally possible for a skilled pilot to make a dead stick landing provided there's a suitable site nearby with acceptable weather conditions.

Is that true for those fighter planes? From a cursory investigation it seems like they’re not very flyable at low speeds without being in vtol mode.

Every plane has what is called a stall speed, which if you go below it it loses its ability to stay in the air. Above that, even 1kt above, the plane will still fly. Also, to make sure you can fly the longest possible distance to have time to troubleshoot any issues, planes also have what is called best glide speed. If you maintain that, you’re golden.

There are a lot of factors that come into play when you lose the engine, but unless there is a serious issue, you still have control over the flight surfaces.

That depends what you mean by "low". The F-35B (like any fixed-wing aircraft) is perfectly well flyable down to stall speed, and below stall speed it doesn't fly at all. For the conditions described, stall speed would probably be something close to 120kn (exact performance parameters are classified). (Some fighters can use thrust vectoring and other aerodynamic tricks to retain a limited amount of post-stall maneuverability but that doesn't really apply in this case.) In an engine failure situation, pilots are trained to trim the aircraft to the speed that will give the best glide ratio and that's going to be well above stall speed.

Vertical flight mode wouldn't be usable in a situation like this. They only transition to vertical flight at low altitude with the landing site in sight.

He was transitioning the aircraft from mode 4 (STOL) to mode 1 (normal flight) when he made the decision to bail. The wings were not generating lift - without computer control the aircraft could have rolled severely.

Pilots eject when the wings are level. If he was facing the possibility of severe uncontrolled roll (or believed he was) then ejecting now before the roll was a good call. At least so far as his wife and children are concerned.

The wings were generating lift and not stalled. Changing the flight control mode doesn't imply that the aircraft was in vertical flight.

Going from mode 4 to mode 1 on the F-35B (I don't know about the AV-8 family) has a significant portion of the flight below stall speed. I don't think that we know at what portion of the flight this happened.

And that's an insignificant detail in the rest of the post anyway, a nuance that does not invalidate the rest of the points made in the post you are replying to.

We do know at what portion of the flight this happened. It's right there in the report. The airplane was in stable forward flight, not stalled. You did not make any valid points.

> No. As long as it has electrical power and the flight controls are working it can remain stable and glide even with a complete engine failure.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm pretty sure that flight controls are directly tied to thrust, because it would be the engine that also drives the hydraulic system.

It's like that even on passenger jets. If you lose both engines, you also lose hydraulics (aside from whatever little hydraulic pressure the ram air turbine provides). I would not expect there to be a ram air turbine on a fighter jet, which would mean complete engine failure = complete loss of hydraulics = complete loss of flight controls.

Nope. While it's true that the F-35 lacks a ram air turbine (RAT), it does have an auxiliary power unit (APU) that can power the flight controls, avionics, and electro-hydrostatic actuators as long as fuel remains. It also has a battery that can power critical systems for a few minutes when all else fails.

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/e...

a plane doesn't change a channel of a radio. a plane has a radio which changes its channels. the plane is what flies.