Inside a Marine's decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter jet and the betrayal in its wake

 By Tony Bartelme

tbartelme@postandcourier.com

1. DECISION

A dark mass of clouds hung low over North Charleston as Marine Col. Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo began his descent. It was a Sunday afternoon, late September 2023. Del Pizzo's hands were on the control stick and throttle of an F-35B Lightning II, the U.S. military’s most advanced stealth fighter, a $136 million supercomputer with wings. The F-35B can hover like a helicopter, and Del Pizzo planned to use that technology to land.

Del Pizzo had just finished a training sortie over the Atlantic with a second F-35B pilot, practicing tactics at upwards of 500 mph at seven times the force of gravity. He needed to experience this jet’s strengths and weaknesses. At 48, he was a full bird colonel getting ready to command a squadron in Yuma, Ariz., a high-visibility assignment to fine-tune the Marines’ aviation strategies and procedures, including those for the F-35B.

As he closed in on Charleston Air Force Base, he knew he’d hit some bumps. Forecasters earlier had said the weather would improve, but the opposite happened. Heavy clouds moved in like a big gray curtain. He shot through some turbulence, streaks of precipitation on the canopy, zero visibility. He’d use his instruments to get through it all. No big deal. Pilots do instrument landings all the time in crud like this.

And the F-35 was packed with instruments, cameras and sensors — all feeding a torrent of data into computers linked to his $400,000 helmet display. The helmet itself was an engineering wonder, custom built for each pilot. It had a dark visor that displayed the jet’s speed, altitude and targeting information, all of which moved with his head. The jet had cameras mounted on the bottom of the plane that streamed videos to the visor. If he looked down, this fusion of data and optics allowed him to see through the plane’s smooth shark-gray shell.

Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m., his helmet flickered. What was that? The plane seemed to be OK. Then the visor erupted in flashes of alerts. Failures in flight control systems, avionics, cooling, navigation, GPS, communications. Audio alerts sounded: whoop, whoop, whoop. Then the helmet and main displays went dark; the audio alerts stopped. About 15 seconds had passed.

Military aviators are taught to make quick decisions using an “OODA Loop”— observe, orient, decide and act. The goal is to cycle through the loop’s four phases faster than your opponent. In this case, Del Pizzo’s opponents were the weather and his jet. The helmet display flashed back on. He ran a loop. Observe, orient: Jet still in the clouds, about 750 feet above ground, still in his control, descending glide path, about 800 feet per minute. Decide, act: Execute a missed approach procedure and get away from the ground. 

He pulled back the stick to climb, pushed the throttle forward for thrust. Raised the landing gear. Pressed a button that converts the jet from vertical mode to conventional. Then the helmet display went dark again, as if rebooting. He tried to radio his wingman, the control tower. Nothing. Coms out. Then it flashed on, along with another thunderstorm of alerts, more than 25 messages telling him that the jet was in deep trouble and getting worse. Whoop, whoop, whoop.

About 30 seconds had passed.

The helmet and main display failed a third time, differently now, as if powering down for good. Instruments gone, a sea of gray outside his window. Is the plane responding? He pulled the throttle back. He glanced at the small backup panel between his legs. He heard what sounded like a motor spooling down. The engine? He felt the nose of the aircraft tilt upward. He felt a falling sensation. He still couldn’t see the ground. Was he still over the base? Over the trees?

Forty-one seconds. Decide, act: The jet’s going into the trees, and I’m going with it. In one quick motion, he reached between his legs for the yellow handle, put his left hand over his right wrist.

And pulled.

2. SEMPER FI

A decision, once acted upon, always changes your trajectory. And for fighter pilots, decisions come at Mach speed. To make quicker ones, pilots train like professional athletes, doing rep after rep until important decisions are intuitive and instantaneous.

Effective procedures are key. At their essence, procedures are based on actions people took in the past that proved to be good ones, decisions worth repeating in the future, especially under pressure. Having procedures in place also means that when something goes sideways you’re protected, not punished — as long as you followed those preset rules. All this makes you and your unit faster and more confident warfighters, especially in combat, when second-guessing can be fatal.

This was the system Del Pizzo grew up in, the system he followed as a young Marine flying AV-8B Harriers. It’s the system he trusted while training and flying more than 2,800 hours in 12 different military aircraft, 759 hours in combat. The system that led to a stream of promotions, to decorations like the Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star, 19 Air Medals. It’s the system that propelled him to a coveted command assignment. One that had his superiors saying he could someday make general. A system that gave him a profound sense of belonging that only other Marines really understand. Semper fi.

And after those 41 seconds in the cockpit of a failing stealth fighter, it’s a system that betrayed him.

His story, shared here for the first time, details his journey back into the cockpit after the mishap, and then how that journey suddenly ended when the Marines relieved him of command more than a year after he pulled the ejection handle. His story answers many questions about what happened that stormy Sunday afternoon in 2023 over North Charleston, but also raises new ones with stakes that go beyond his mishap: Did the Marines create a dangerous precedent by relieving Del Pizzo? One that makes pilots hesitate to punch out of a malfunctioning aircraft?

And, from another altitude: As everything from cars to fighter jets become more dependent on technology, who’s to blame when those machines fail you?

3. FLYER

Del Pizzo always wanted to fly. You can see the proof in the old photos. They’re displayed on the laptop he opened recently on the countertop of a mostly empty house near Washington, D.C.

There he was in a time-faded snapshot, age 2 or 3, smiling in a cockpit of a retired A-4 Skyhawk at a Florida air base, the same jet his father flew in Vietnam. A huge white helmet covered the boy’s bright red hair.

And in another shot, about the same age, swallowed up by his dad’s khaki uniform shirt with his Navy wings and ribbons. And there in a third photo, grinning even more in his dad’s Navy dress jacket, his father holding him and smiling, too.

Del Pizzo looked away from the laptop. Around him, the house had an echo that empty houses have. He and his family will move in soon. After 31 years in the Marines, he’d finally retired, honorable discharge. He’d arrived that morning after driving from Yuma in a rented U-Haul, his Jeep towed behind.

Del Pizzo is a thin man with thick hair that’s still red. He doesn’t quite fit the movie star version of the cocky fighter jet jock. He’s confident but freely tosses out self-deprecating jokes. He speaks more easily about others in his life than himself. Like his grandfather.

Next to his laptop on the kitchen counter was the metal canteen cup his grandfather carried in World War II, hand-etched with the European countries he marched through under Gen. George Patton’s command. “He was a poor Italian kid in Philly who married the rich Irish girl he met at church, one of those guys who could hear a song once and then play it on the piano without taking lessons.”

Growing up, Del Pizzo thought he’d end up in the Navy like his father. “My dad could fix anything on the car. You know, it's funny what you lose in generations — like I have no Italian language skills, no car-fixing skills. But I guess I got the pilot gene.”

After Vietnam, his father flew jets for the now-defunct Eastern Airlines. The family moved to Atlanta, a major hub.

“I was an airline kid. My dad loved flying, and I don’t remember a time in my life growing up that I didn’t want to fly jets just like my dad.”

At 17, he did boot camp at Parris Island in South Carolina, but he still thought he'd end up in the Navy like his father. From boot camp, he went to Auburn University, mixing college with military training during summers. He also made a course correction. The Marines offered him a faster route to flying jets than the Navy. After graduating with a degree in criminal justice, he flew straight into flight school in Pensacola, Fla.

By then, he already had his pilot’s license, and his love of flight only grew as he logged more time in the air: the eerie night skies, the early mornings when you broke through the cloud bank and saw the rising sun resting on top of it. It might be raining and dark below, but above it was wonderful.

“When I'm in the air, I feel like that's where I'm supposed to be. And when I'm not in the air, I want to get back there.”

4. COMBAT

By 25, he was flying Harriers, the jump jet created by Great Britain, a stubby, muscular aircraft that was the first fighter to take off and land vertically like a helicopter. His call sign was “Cheez,” which loosely rhymed with the way he pronounced Del Pizzo (Peezo). The Harrier’s ability to hover allowed pilots to land without runways. But they were beasts to fly.

During the Harrier’s first two decades of service, at least 45 Marines died in noncombat incidents, making it one of the military’s most dangerous airplanes to fly. Over time, the Marines made adjustments and improved procedures, and the mishap rate declined. But the Corps still typically picked the most skilled pilots to fly these finicky birds.

In 2003, Del Pizzo was deployed to the Middle East for Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was his first combat deployment, and his father met him just as he was about to leave. They hadn’t talked much about Vietnam, so he was a little surprised when his father hugged him and said: “You know, I went to war so you wouldn’t have to.”

But soon Del Pizzo was crossing into Iraqi airspace with 11 other Harriers and hundreds of U.S. and allied aircraft. The sun had just set. The darkening sky was filled with Iraqi long-range artillery shells flying over them. Ballistic missiles headed toward them. He saw explosions over a hill where Marines on the ground breached a defense. But when it came time to drop his 1,000-pound bomb, it wouldn’t release, stuck because something was too tight. OODA Loop time. Observe: Bomb still there. Orient: Plane OK. Decide, act: Continue with the mission and get the jet back to the base.

Roughly a decade later, he was flying a Harrier to New Mexico for an exercise. At about 25,000 feet, a fire broke out in the avionics bay, frying the plane's electronics, radar, main displays and systems that stabilized the plane. He worked with air traffic controllers to guide him in, and he landed without incident. 

Military aviators who knew him said he had an uncanny ability to stay “ahead of the jet” — calmly manage a flood of information about targets, threats, troops on the ground, while piloting a plane at 500 mph. “If you were flying north into Iraq, he was the guy you wanted to lead the mission,” said Guy Berry, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and former Harrier pilot.

Time passed, and Del Pizzo’s trajectory through the Marine Corps moved upward and steady: deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Japan; deployments to Bahrain for combat missions into Syria for Operation Inherent Resolve. He flew Harriers off amphibious assault ships. At the Pentagon, he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff working on Southeast Asia policy, and with Navy staff on amphibious expedition warfare. He worked in the F-35 Joint Program Office, where he served as the senior Marine representative and at Marine Headquarters. His mentors included Marine generals.

In 2022, he was selected to take command of Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1 in Yuma, referred to as VMX-1. It was a choice assignment where Marines test their aircraft to make sure procedures and standards work in real-world scenarios.

To Del Pizzo, commanding VMX-1 would be the pinnacle of his career as a military aviator. Good procedures and standards tested in Yuma could save Marines’ lives in the field. But he wouldn’t formally take command that year. The Marines were short of colonels, and he was assigned more duties at the Pentagon. In the interim, he also needed to learn how to fly the F-35B. And to do that, he traveled to Beaufort.

Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort is home of the “Warlords,” Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501. The base is off U.S. Highway 21, past a drive-in theater. A slight rise offers a brief view of runways and khaki outdoor canopies shading F-35Bs. A sign at the base entrance says, "The 'noise' you hear is the sound of freedom."

It’s one of two Marine F-35B training centers, with the second in San Diego. It has advanced simulators and a time-tested curriculum. “Hands down, it was the best training I’d ever had, world-class,” Del Pizzo said.

He flew an F-35B for the first time in April 2023, returning to the Beaufort base with a smile on his face. The jet was the most impressive machine he’d ever flown, a mind meld with computers and brute force.

As a future commander of VMX-1, he needed to know as much about the F-35B as possible. The F-35 is the military’s most ambitious weapons system, a $2 trillion investment over the next 50 years in the nation’s air defense capabilities. The jet has three variations: the F-35A, used mainly by the Air Force; the F-35B, which can hover; and the F-35C, which has a more robust structure for carrier landings. All three variants have a stealthy shape and advanced composite shells to evade enemy radar.

But its real value is in the electronics inside; computers and sensors take over some of the pilot’s duties, so pilots become quarterbacks, directing other planes to their targets or serving as forward spotters for ground artillery. 

But complex systems can come with potential flaws; because these systems build on one another, failures can propagate like a virus.

5. THE FALL

After you pull the ejection handle on a fighter jet, straps on the seat instantly pin your arms and legs so they don’t flail when you hit the slipstream. Air bags inflate around your neck and head. A line of explosives above your head shatters the canopy. Rockets on the seat fire, launching you and the seat with a force 18 times greater than gravity. By the time the chute opens, only 3 seconds have passed.

Fighter pilots know that about one of 10 ejections lead to death, and one out of 3 end up with spinal damage or other severe injuries.

When Del Pizzo pulled the handle, he heard a bang like a shotgun shell. Shards of metal dug into his neck from the explosives that blasted the canopy apart.

“The next thing I remember, as I began to come up the seat rail, my helmet and mask got ripped off in the wind stream, ripped straight off my face. 

“I remember feeling the precipitation on my face, and then just being pulled back as the drogue chute opened and slowed me down.” (A drogue chute is a small parachute that stops the pilot from tumbling.)

“And I could hear the engine noise from the airplane. With my helmet off, it was pretty loud. What I heard was complete chaos. Things falling around me. And that's when I thought the airplane is going to come down and hit me, because I felt like the airplane was out of control, right? I thought the airplane is going to hit me, and I'm going to die here in this parachute.”

He wouldn’t learn until much later that after he ejected, the jet converted from its vertical mode to conventional and kept flying.

A few more seconds passed, and he dropped below the clouds. Another OODA Loop. Observe, orient: He could see the ground now, but no sign of the plane crash; he was above a neighborhood, heading toward power lines. Decide, act: A survival kit attached to a lanyard dangled below him; he released it to avoid snagging in the wires; he reached up for the chute’s toggles and steered toward a house. He aimed for a backyard about the size of an average living room.

He landed by the back fence, his chute tangling in the trees. It was raining. His back hurt. He walked to the house’s backdoor and knocked.

A shocked family opened the door.

“They were looking at me in my wet flight suit in their backyard, with me telling them I needed to call 911.”

After a moment, a woman and her son ushered him into the kitchen. The father helped Del Pizzo stop some bleeding from the shrapnel wounds. The son called 911, and after briefly talking to the dispatcher, handed Del Pizzo the phone.

“I’m the pilot,” Del Pizzo can be heard saying in the recording. “We need to get rescue rolling. I’m not sure where the airplane is. It would have crash-landed somewhere. I ejected.”

The dispatcher was slow to understand, and Del Pizzo said it was unfair to criticize her, as some on social media did after news organizations posted the 911 recording. What happened was highly unusual, he said. Something that dispatchers probably wouldn’t see in their own training. Uppermost in his mind as he talked to the dispatcher and arriving paramedics: What happened to the jet?

“My biggest fear was that I’d hurt someone.”

Paramedics loaded him in an ambulance, and they sped to the Medical University of South Carolina in downtown Charleston. During the trip, he accidentally pocket-dialed his eldest teenage son, who could only hear voices and sirens in the background.

At some point, he called his wife, Jessica, who was at their youngest son’s flag football game. He knew that mishaps trigger investigations. Protocols required him to keep details at a minimum. So the conversation was short on specifics, mainly that he was alive.

In the ambulance, he kept asking if the plane crash had hurt anyone. No, the paramedics told him, there was no word of a crash. Same thing in the hospital.

“I thought the plane would come down in someone’s backyard, or hit someone’s house, and that horrified me.”

But why wasn’t there any news? An ejected pilot without a plane crash? It was like a surreal riddle. He was so baffled that at one point he turned to a doctor.

“I asked, ‘Am I dead?’ No one could give me any information about the airplane.”

There, in the emergency room, he also learned he’d broken his back.

6. MYSTERY

In military aviation circles, an unintended incident that leads to a death, injury or significant property damage is called a “mishap” — not an accident — and mishaps trigger a cascade of investigations. The probes into Del Pizzo’s mishap were especially sensitive given the secrecy of the F-35’s stealth technology and capabilities, and what happened after he ejected.

Instead of the smoking hole he expected below him, the jet climbed at a 5-degree angle to about 9,300 feet, then descended in a long right turn. It flew for 11 minutes and 21 seconds, an average speed of at least 350 mph. In Williamsburg County, the jet clipped the tops of trees. The jet crashed near a swamp and fields in a community called Indiantown. Investigators later pegged its speed on impact at 635 mph.

In heavily redacted documents later released by the military, investigators also described an “electrical malfunction” that knocked out radios, tactical navigation systems, landing guidance systems and a key transponder that would have automatically sent the jet’s location to air traffic controllers. The loss of that tracking device and the jet’s stealthy design made it more difficult to pinpoint the crash site.

Hours passed without news of a crash. The void created an opening, especially on social media. It didn’t help when an Air Force spokesperson sought help from the public. A stealth fighter missing? Memes popped up with a sign on a telephone pole, with a photo of an F-35 and a caption: “Have you seen this plane?” Could the military really lose such a connected plane?

In the hospital, Del Pizzo suspected an electrically charged media storm was brewing outside. A Marine buddy showed up after driving all night from North Carolina.

“He was following things on social media and said, ‘You’re trending on Twitter.’ I laughed, and then he said: ‘No, it’s not you. It’s the airplane.’ ”

His wife, Jessica, soon arrived.

“He’s not on social media much, but I took away his phone,” she recalled. “I didn’t want him to see those memes.”

At one point, Del Pizzo heard the commandant of the Marines, Gen. Eric M. Smith, wanted to speak with him. That surprised Del Pizzo. Maybe it was merely an effort to express concern to a fellow Marine. But such a conversation could go against standard protocols to keep investigations as objective and influence-free as possible.

“I think it was surrounding some of the things going on in the media at the time,” Del Pizzo said, “and maybe he wanted some answers.”

He learned later that a senior officer persuaded Smith not to talk to him. It was a hint of the mishap’s sensitivity and the trouble to come.

After about 24 hours without a crash site location, a South Carolina Civil Air Patrol team identified a promising target near Hemingway based on its analysis of radar pings. Search teams moved in. Residents told them they’d heard a loud bang and flash that Sunday afternoon. A military fire official noted scorched trees near Boggy Swamp and found the debris, closing one loop.

But more questions lingered as military workers sealed off the site: Why did Del Pizzo eject when the plane continued to fly? Had something gone wrong with the plane's technology? Did Del Pizzo punch out too early?

Against this backdrop, Del Pizzo and his wife left the hospital, him in a back brace. He had cracked vertebrae in his lower and middle back, but doctors said his prognosis was good. After a night in a local hotel, they went to Charleston International Airport and waited for a flight back to Washington, D.C.

“It was good to get out of that area because so many people were talking about it,” Jessica Del Pizzo recalled. “But I remember that at the airport we looked at each other and said how weird it was to be getting in an airplane.”

7. LESSONS

Three separate investigations would explore what happened and why, each with a different focus.

A Navy Aviation Mishap Board had teams of F-35 aviators, engineers and experts. Its goal was to identify mistakes and weaknesses, and draw up lessons to prevent future mishaps. Underlying the board’s work were legal protections that prevented superiors from punishing pilots and crews for anything they told investigators. Results of this investigation aren’t released to the public.

The second investigation was the Field Flight Performance Board. Its main aim: Look at the pilot's actions. Led by a senior F-35 pilot, it also included experienced military aviators and experts. The board's report typically isn't released to the public.

The third was the Marines’ Command Investigation. A senior officer handled this one. These probes usually have a limited scope. Their goal is primarily legal: to determine whether a pilot engaged in misconduct. Results of this investigation can be released to the public.

The first two investigations came to similar conclusions, according to Del Pizzo, officials knowledgeable about the reports’ contents and documents obtained by The Post and Courier through open records laws: Del Pizzo’s aircraft experienced a significant electrical malfunction, one that knocked out key systems — including displays and navigation aids he needed to land in severe weather. Knobs to radios weren’t working, making it difficult to contact air traffic controllers or his wingman for guidance. A small backup display was partially functional, but Del Pizzo had to look down to see it.

This and the zero-visibility conditions likely contributed to a phenomenon known as spatial disorientation, where your inner ear tricks you into feeling that you’re dizzy or falling.

Both investigations noted that nothing in the military’s training and simulator work prepared pilots for a crescendo of systems failures in severe weather at a low altitude. In fact, the F-35B’s flight manual said, “the aircraft is considered to be in out of controlled flight (OCF) when it fails to respond properly to pilot inputs,” adding, “if out of control below 6,000 feet AGL (above ground level): EJECT.”

Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.

The Field Flight Performance Board lauded Del Pizzo’s record and potential to move on after the mishap.

“Colonel Del Pizzo is a career-long high performing naval aviator and Marine officer. There is no indication that Colonel Del Pizzo was overconfident in his abilities or reckless in mission execution … The board unanimously believes that Colonel Del Pizzo exercised sound judgment in his actions on 17 September 2023.”

And both investigation boards made numerous recommendations, including new scenarios in simulators and changes in training. In Del Pizzo’s mind, that was how the system was supposed to work.

But the officer in charge of the third investigation came to a different conclusion. The officer agreed that Del Pizzo followed procedures under difficult conditions, and that Del Pizzo didn’t engage in any misconduct. However, he found the mishap “occurred as a result of pilot error, in that the MP (mishap pilot) incorrectly diagnosed an OCF flight emergency and ejected from a flyable aircraft.”

His report pegged the cost of the plane's loss at $136 million.

Del Pizzo reviewed that report in early 2024, while still recovering from his broken back. He disagreed with the logic. Without a massive system failure while flying blind in the clouds, he wouldn’t have ejected. This investigation also went beyond its normal scope of determining misconduct, which Del Pizzo and other experienced aviators interviewed for this story said was highly unusual. But Command Investigation reports typically didn’t carry the same weight as the other two safety investigations. 

And the report’s conclusion that he was to blame didn’t seem to affect his career arc.

His back healed, and he was cleared to fly fighter jets again. By April 2024, seven months after the mishap, he was back in Beaufort, climbing into an F-35B, feeling a sense of gratitude for another chance. Those flights also would solve another mystery.

Just before he ejected, he heard what he thought was the engine spooling down. But flying again in the F-35B he realized it wasn’t the engine, it was the powerful lift fan the plane uses in hover mode. The sound of the fan slowing down contributed to the illusion that he’d lost power and was falling. An important lesson to pass on to future pilots, he thought.

And he was still on track to take command of VMX-1 in Arizona.

"I kept asking headquarters, 'Am I good?' Almost every week." They kept giving him the green light. "The aviation leadership couldn't have been more supportive."

In May 2024, he began moving his family to Yuma. That same month, he received the Legion of Merit for his work at the Pentagon. Smith, the Marine commandant, visited Yuma that summer and seemed pleased. Del Pizzo said at one point, Smith asked him about his future career plans. Del Pizzo said that he was weighing his options. Smith told him that command of VMX-1 wasn’t his last chapter as a Marine. “We put you here for a reason,” which Del Pizzo interpreted as a vote of confidence in his future in the Marines.

Marine officers are regularly evaluated for their fitness to command, a report card of sorts that the commandant uses for promotions. Del Pizzo’s were stellar. Signed by two generals, one report in mid-2024 said: “Absolutely must promote, GO (general) potential … Cheez is a pure professional with unlimited future potential … Has my highest recommendation for promotion.”

Another report later in 2024 said Del Pizzo’s work in Yuma was “setting the course for Marine Aviation’s future … highest recommendation for promotion … Place where our Corps’ hardest problems must be solved … Col. Del Pizzo’s potential in our Corps is unlimited.”

So he was stunned when he got the call last October: After 103 days of command in Yuma, the commandant had relieved him of duty.

Effective immediately.

8. BETRAYAL

The news came in a video call with one of the two generals who had written that Del Pizzo had unlimited promotion potential.

“I thought it was just a chance to catch up,” Del Pizzo recalled. “I thought, ‘This is great. I get some one-on-one time with the bosses and talk about how things are going.’ ”

Instead, the conversation moved immediately to the mishap.

The lieutenant general told him he’d done nothing wrong during his command in Yuma, but that a press release was about to be issued about Command Investigation’s findings. Smith, the commandant, had reviewed the report again and decided that Del Pizzo shouldn’t have such a high-visibility command. Results from the other two investigations, the ones that concluded Del Pizzo hadn’t been at fault, wouldn’t be released. The Marines would explain the sudden relief of command by saying it was due to a “loss of trust and confidence,” which hit Del Pizzo like a dagger because it implied misconduct.

Stunned, Del Pizzo asked if he could have a small change of command ceremony — hand over the squadron’s flag as a way of thanking the people who had been so welcoming when he took over.

Request denied.

Soon, more than 300 Marines, sailors and civilians under his command in Yuma were told that he had been relieved for “misdiagnosis of an out-of-control flight situation.” Until then, only a small circle of people knew he’d ejected from the F-35B in South Carolina.

Del Pizzo called his wife, Jessica, to meet him at the their home off base. He didn’t explain. She wondered why he didn't just send her a text.

“I walked in the door and saw his face, and he looked completely defeated."

Like her husband, she struggled to understand the timing and the treatment. All three investigations had been done in early 2024, but the Marines still gave him a green light to take command? Why put him and his family through a cross-country move? What had changed between early 2024 and that fall?

“We replayed it all the time, going back and forth,” she recalled. “And we couldn’t figure it out.”

Del Pizzo asked to speak to the commandant directly.

“Obviously, I had a lot of questions.”

Request denied.

9. WRECKAGE

The F-35 program is the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program, a decades-long push to replace many of the military’s earlier generation fighters, from F-16s to Harriers. The military has at least 630 F-35s across the Air Force, Navy and Marines, with plans to build a fleet of 2,400 jets over the coming years.

But in 2023, the year of Del Pizzo’s mishap, F-35Bs were fully available for missions only 15 to 36 percent of the time, the Government Accountability Office reported. Critics of the F-35 cite the program’s costs and manufacturing delays. One big concern has been the jet's computers and software.

Two months before Del Pizzo’s mishap, the Defense Department stopped accepting some newly built F-35s over frustration with Lockheed Martin’s pace of installing better displays and more powerful computers. Those technology upgrades are only now set to be in place this summer. Test pilots reportedly have had to reboot their radar and electronic warfare systems in midair, another GAO report said.

The exact cause of the electrical malfunction in Del Pizzo’s mishap is hidden in redacted documents, pages the military said it blacked out for national security purposes. Unredacted portions ruled out some causes, though. Thunderstorms were in the area, but bolts at the time of the mishap were 20 miles away and couldn’t have fried the plane’s electronics. Investigators noted that the aircraft entered heavy rain five minutes before Del Pizzo ejected. But a Marine spokesperson said its investigation found no evidence that rainwater caused the electrical malfunction.

Del Pizzo isn’t one of the F-35’s critics. In fact, he’s a big cheerleader of the technology and the jet’s potential. He sees its evolution through the lens of a Harrier pilot. Harriers had even more issues but became one of the military’s aviation stalwarts because of constant improvements in technology and procedures. He’d seen firsthand during his work at the Pentagon how tirelessly people in the F-35 program were working to do the same for that jet.

Learning lessons was key, which is one reason he was so concerned about the way he was relieved of command. Punishing him moved the spotlight away from the jet’s issues.

“We needed to take a hard look at that to prevent it from happening again,” he said. “In aviation, we have a culture. When there are errors, when things don't go as planned, we learn from them. If you don’t do that, then you have a culture of fear. And if you have a culture of fear, then people are going to be paralyzed and not be able to make decisions. And that's how people end up getting hurt. That's how people end up getting killed.”

Some active duty and retired military aviators familiar with Del Pizzo's situation were appalled by his treatment.

"We fired a guy because of a press release," said one.

Another added that the treatment of Del Pizzo sends a dangerous message: If you eject, your career is over. "The easiest thing to do is blame the pilot."

The Post and Courier provided officials at Marine Headquarters with a list of questions about the commandant's decision to relieve Del Pizzo, the timing of his order and whether he factored in whether his decision set a dangerous precedent for Marine aviators in the future. The newspaper also offered Gen. Smith a chance to respond personally. Marine officials acknowledged receiving the questions but did not provide any answers.

10. CULTURE

There’s an aviation metaphor that business leaders and self-help gurus often deploy: During a flight, a plane is off-course 90 percent of the time. Reaching a destination means constant adjustments to turbulence, air traffic and sometimes human errors.

Lives and careers have their own kinds of turbulence and course-changers. As Del Pizzo recently unpacked his U-Haul at the family’s newly rented home near Washington, D.C., he talked about adjustments in his life, namely what it was like to be newly retired from an institution that had for so long been part of his identity.

He’s at peace with his decision to eject, though his mind also can start spinning what-ifs. What if the forecast had been more accurate? What if the cloud cover had been just a few hundred feet higher and he’d been able to see the ground? What if he had radio contact and could talk to his wingman? What if he decided not to retire? The commandant's order to relieve him probably killed any chances of promotion. What if he'd stuck it out? It can be difficult to close those loops.

The deeper pain comes from what happened more than a year after he pulled the ejection handle.

“Maybe it was just a business decision,” Del Pizzo said of the commandant’s move to relieve him of command. “But there's a human element that you have to take care of. You can't just discard someone because it's inconvenient or a bad headline, right? You need to make sure you take care of the people. That's how you maintain that culture of trust.”

As he unpacked, schoolyard sounds could be heard in the distance. Yellow-and-gray plastic moving crates were stacked in the living room. Two friends, both retired military, showed up to help him get settled. You don’t really retire from the Marines. You’re still part of a group of people who helped forge who you are, and that never leaves you.

He’d soon head back to Yuma to close the house down there, flying into the new unknowns of civilian life, questions lingering in the slipstream of 41 seconds of sensory chaos above North Charleston and 31 years as a Marine that ended because of someone else’s decision.

ABOUT THIS STORY

This story began with the mystery surrounding the ejection and crash in 2023 — and the length of time the Marines took to answer basic questions about what happened and why. Tony Bartelme’s previous reports in 2024 dove deep into the F-35’s history and pros and cons, while exploring the vacuum of information. Charles “Tre” Del Pizzo’s decision to tell his story answers many of those questions. He agreed to do so because he said he hoped lessons could be learned to help future Marines.

To corroborate his story and other aspects of military investigation procedures, The Post and Courier interviewed a half-dozen military aviators, most of whom requested anonymity. The newspaper also interviewed F-35 experts, both critics and supporters. The newspaper obtained more than 700 pages of heavily redacted documents about the incident from the Defense Department and local law enforcement agencies. Del Pizzo provided documentation of his military record and fitness reports for our review.

Bartelme and Robert Scheer traveled to Washington, D.C., for in-person interviews. Funding for the project was supported by the newspaper’s nonprofit Public Service and Investigative Fund.

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