> 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.