U.S. Marines release report on cause of missing F-35 incident
2ndmaw.marines.mil> Contributing factors to the mishap included an electrical event during flight, which induced failures of both primary radios, the transponder, the tactical air navigation system, and the instrument landing system
Are F-35 Lightnings already permitted to fly to operate within 25 miles from thunderstorm or other atmospheric electrical activity?
Extended edition:
> The investigation concluded that the mishap occurred due to pilot error. The pilot incorrectly diagnosed an out-of-controlled flight emergency and ejected from a flyable aircraft, albeit during a heavy rainstorm compounded with aircraft electrical and display malfunctions.
> Contributing factors to the mishap included an electrical event during flight, which induced failures of both primary radios, the transponder, the tactical air navigation system, and the instrument landing system; and the probability that the helmet-mounted display and panoramic cockpit display were not operational for at least three distinct periods. This caused the pilot to become disoriented in challenging instrument and meteorological conditions. This electrical malfunction was not related to any maintenance activities.
SO... Assuming that the pilot is not both Neil Armstrong* and the F-35's lead avionics systems engineer...how is it reasonable to expect him to stick with a fly-by-wire plane that is that badly - so far as he can tell - FUBAR'ed? Adding his corpse to the wreck would not improve the situation.
*And recall the even Neil bailed out of the LLRV, leaving it to crash, under conditions far less bad than this F-35 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle
The actual flight systems were still working perfectly. All the stuff that failed are unrelated to flying the airplane. The ILS is necessary to land in bad weather, so if it fails you’re supposed to abort the landing and go to your alternate. You always choose your alternate so that the weather there is better than your primary, so that you won’t need the ILS to land there. The pilot had already aborted the landing due to the ILS failure when the other failures began, so he should have simply kept flying using the standby cockpit instruments to maintain a level climb back out of the weather.
A comparison to the LLRV is not a good idea, since that was an experimental craft with radically different characteristics than a normal airplane. It was barely flyable on the best of days.
When you're seeing multiple major failures from an overall system that complex, and don't have 10K spare hours to trace through all the wiring harnesses and docs before you gotta decide - then it may be reasonable to suspect that there is a common upstream cause (say, an undetected fire eating through critical stuff) and decide to bail.
My LLRV point was that even the fabled St. Neil bailed when things were obviously headed south. And that LLRV was a vastly simpler system than the F-35 - for Neil to, in theory, quickly figure out what was going wrong and land safely.
No, you’re misunderstanding. The F–35 has three displays, the heads–up display in the helmet, the primary display which is a large LCD panel that takes up the entire width of the cockpit, and a smaller standby display below that. (You can find plenty of pictures.) The HMD and primary display both turned off, then rebooted and came back on several times. The standby display didn’t; it kept displaying the critical flight data and artificial horizon the entire time. There was no faulty data, there were no broken sensors, nothing. He could have simply flown the plane using the data on the standby display alone, and should have. That’s the mistake he made.
It says this directly in the report:
Analogies are not always useful, but if your PC has three monitors and two of them are blinking on and off, do you automatically distrust what is shown on the third? Do you toss your whole computer out the window? Probably not.24. MP’s decision to eject was ultimately inappropriate, because commanded flight inputs were in-progress at the time of ejection, standby flight instrumentation was providing accurate data, and the MA’s backup radio was, at least partially, functional. Furthermore, the aircraft continued to fly for an extended period after ejection.> ..if your PC has three monitors and two of them are blinking...
Not a good analogy, because dying in a FPS game != dying IRL.
I've dealt with computers that had bad power supplies, bad upstream power, or ground loop issues. When things get weird, you really shouldn't trust the parts of the system that aren't yet acting wonky. Not with any data that matters to you.
That said, I'm neither an aerospace engineer, nor a pilot. In those fields, standard are probably different.
>Are F-35 Lightnings already permitted to fly to operate within 25 miles from thunderstorm or other atmospheric electrical activity?
F-35As were just cleared for all weather flight this April. The crash occured in 2023 but was the B model. Not sure what that might mean or not mean.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/f-35-lightning-ii-fig...