4 ms·

Marine Corps orders safety stand-down of all aircraft after F-35 disappearance

37 points by fortran77 3y ago

kyrra 3y ago
It should be noted that the debris field was found for the missing fighter jet. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f-35-fighter-jet-missing-pilot-ejects-mishap-rcna105534 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f-35-fighter-jet-missin...
- fortran77 3y ago
  In fact, TFA notes this: > Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Ah yes, the SI unit of distance obviously being the hour. (For an aircraft mishap in particular, this is more ambiguous than usual.)
    - jedberg 3y ago
      It was probably written by a reporter based in LA, where we measure distance in hours/minutes.
      - speed_spread 3y ago
        And speed is in football fields per hour?
        lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        Hours per gallon, actually.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        speed is distance over time, so obviously hours-per-hour. "Traffic was really bad; we were only going half-an-hour per hour..." The kids will shorten it in slang to just the unitless dimension. "Rick's car is really fast; we got it up over 2.5 yesterday!"
        hunter2_ 3y ago
        Oddly enough, household energy consumption is often stated in kWh/year. Being that hours per year is a bit under 10,000 one can convert this kWh/year ridiculousness onto simple W, and the resulting amount is only one order of magnitude different. But I guess it helps people annualize their their electric bill (monthly statements being in kWh) without much math.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        In the course of doing some energy improvements (and considering various options), I used the rule of the thumb that 1W continuous costs $2/yr, which was more than close enough mathematically, surely made the math easier to do in my head, and was in the units of the actual tradeoff that I was making (buy an efficiency improvement for $Y, save $Z/yr).
      - dr_kretyn 3y ago
        That seems to be generally a US thing. Many of my colleagues from Texas, Washington and Virginia tell distance in minutes/hours that they (would have) spent driving. It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". They mean that it depends on the traffic but I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.
        lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". I hadn’t noticed that before but I probably will now. That does seem to be a US thing. Often a person will respond in units of distance and time, one after the other. It does make sense given the effect that traffic conditions in a city can have on the travel time but “how far?” “it depends” is really funny. > I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space. My thought was their home is some kind of moving fortress. A city on the back of a turtle wandering along the coast.
        mintplant 3y ago
        I think there's an implicit cultural understanding that when someone here asks how far away something is, what they really want to know is how long it will take them to drive there.
      - majormajor 3y ago
        IMO this is the case in Texas too and it honestly works a lot better there because in LA an hour is very different at 5PM and 10PM. (Still different in TX cities, but to a lesser extent and for a smaller time period.)
      - yardstick 3y ago
        Come to think about it, time vs miles/km feels more natural in most situations I can think of. In London we would describe a journey based on time (or maybe stops, but only for very short train journeys) not distance. Same for international travel- measured in flight time not distance travelled. Because in most situations knowing how far away something is takes second place to knowing how long to get there. That’s what is relevant. Now as to this crash location, I guess it means 2 hours by car but yeah it’s more ambiguous than a more widely understood journey.
    - mohn 3y ago
      Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)
    - mensetmanusman 3y ago
      Two hours is a common unit for storm chasers!
    - jayd16 3y ago
      The only logical explanation is its about 150 degree minutes.
  - irrational 3y ago
    two and a half hours walking? riding a bike? driving in a car? flying in a jet? traveling in the ISS?
    - mey 3y ago
      Parsecs
    - bonestamp2 3y ago
      Unladen Swallow
- ftxbro 3y ago
  if i'm ever in the news i never want the story to be like 'debris field was found'
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  The article mentions this and makes it quite clear it's not the debris of the f35. > Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base. > Two defense officials said Monday that although the jet was on autopilot when the pilot ejected, it does not have the range or ability to fly for such a long period without refueling.
turnsout 3y ago
During the stand-down, Marine commanders will distribute a Xeroxed update to the F-35 flight manual making it clear that autopilot should be disengaged prior to ejection. /s
mlinhares 3y ago
Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s? It definitely feels like the F-35 has been plagued by issues for a really long time.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s? Shhh. You're seeing the absurd janky house of cards that the trillion dollar online ad business really is. Their marketing CDP says you're a Pentagon official with purchasing power.
  - avalys 3y ago
    It doesn't need to be perfect to be effective. So what if someone sees the wrong ad even half the time?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - ramesh31 3y ago
      "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Ad tech was supposed to solve this. But the reality is they are selling people a rube goldberg machine that throws darts at a wall, and charging money for it like it's the Oracle of Delphi.
- SonicScrub 3y ago
  Not really. Large military procurement programs are always a gold-mine for the media, especially those involving new technologies (compared with design iterations). Issues, bugs, production issues, etc are inevitable, and given the large price tag associated with a program like this, the stories are easy to write. The F-35 had it's fair share of these, but now that the program has matured, the incident rate is less than it's contemporaries. It currently has one of the best safety records of US fighter jets. But F-16s don't generate the safe media buzz when they crash. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more-likely-to-crash-data/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-...
babyshake 3y ago
Isn't it bad opsec for this to be public knowledge?
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  For any threat that considers the flight routines of the military, they assuredly have intel that will make them aware of this. Even down to a source by a base saying "huh, no flights took off today, odd."
mtreis86 3y ago
I wonder what the furthest an abandoned aircraft has glided before crashing.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
Politicians need to communicate that an iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 50 of them, and they still have bugs. It costs money to keep a supply chain going for rare items. Maybe a smarter approach is to build broadly useful factories that can switch on a dime during times of war, but no one has figured that out. The thing about expensive tech that gives you an advantage is that random consumers can’t afford it.
- bhawks 3y ago
  We have been running military operations nonstop for practically 40 years. Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together. There is little functional or healthy about the current state of affairs.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    >Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together. That's because we practically subsidize the majority of our allies' militaries.
    - asynchronous 3y ago
      That’s the quiet part we don’t want to say out loud- the rest of the western world effectively gets a free pass on military spending at our expense.
  - adventured 3y ago
    Most of the US military budget is directly related to labor costs. US labor is extremely expensive in all regards, on par with some of wealthiest nations in Europe. If you properly adjust for that fact - basically do some manner of reasonable PPP adjustment - China is already spending on par with or more than the US at this point. The reason the US military budget is seemingly so massive, is because the US economy has such an extreme output per capita, at present ~$80,000 (Britain + Japan combined). Astronomical for a nation so large. ~3% of $27 trillion is not unreasonable for a superpower with global interests. Russia has given us a demonstration, again, that we in fact do need that military capability. China will probably provide another.
bhawks 3y ago
This affects all air craft not just the F35 > “During the safety stand down, aviation commanders will lead discussions with their Marines focusing on the fundamentals of safe flight operations, ground safety, maintenance and flight procedures, and maintaining combat readiness,” the statement said. It is pretty damning and disappointing that this action is warranted. Too much spending on tools and not enough on soldiers.
- berkle4455 3y ago
  This is mostly just how the Marine Corps fixes fuckups. LCpl Schmuckatelli gets one hooker pregnant and suddenly the entire battalion has their 96 canked, we’re all having 0700 safe-sex safety briefings Saturday morning, and Doc is handing out condoms.
- TylerE 3y ago
  I don't know why the military can't learn from a string of failed systems going back to at least the '80s. 1. Make Tough Requirements 2. Get Prototype 3. Prototype attracts some interest 4. Now the brass additionally wants capabilities X, Y, Z 5. Prototype now costs twice as much and is more failure prone, and actually less mission-capable due to all the bolt-ons 6. Program costs goes up due to all the changes 7. We can't afford this! 8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50% 9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D? 10. Now we REALLY can't afford this. 11. Cut orders by another 75% 12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge. 13. Program fails in the mid-to-long term due to maintenance costs and falling spares inventory. HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU
  - throw0101b 3y ago
    > HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU Great in that it is entertaining, but I would not take it, or the book it was based on, completely at face value: > The Pentagon Wars was made to be a comedy first and an adaptation of the Pentagon Wars book second. It was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Bradley program and it shows. You're getting Hollywood taking an an axe-grinding, half-true memoir as fact and then playing it for laughs. * https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_just_watched_the_pentagon_wars_how_has_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j... See also perhaps: > Although the Bradley destroyed many enemy tanks and experienced fairly low rates of casualty in the First Gulf War and the Iraq War, the vehicle’s recent battlefield performance was not acquired through efficient planning and project management. The origins of the modern Bradley span decades of troubled development; the involvement of many stakeholders; inflexible and questionable requirements; a failure of contractors to make design tradeoffs for fear of losing capability; billions of dollars in R&D costs; and numerous Congressional interventions, including House Armed Service Committee hearings investigating Bradley testing protocol.1 The Bradley has been described at different times, by military officers and historians, as a weapon that means “all things to all people,” a “quintessential hybrid,” and “a proverbial camel...that does nothing well”.2 * https://user.eng.umd.edu/~austin/enes489p/lecture-resources/BradleyFightingVehicle-Scenario.pdf https://user.eng.umd.edu/~austin/enes489p/lecture-resources/...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ls612 3y ago
Is it possible that the ejection mechanism malfunctioned and ejected the pilot from a perfectly working airplane? Has such a thing happened before?
- gs17 3y ago
  Not exactly that, but the Cornfield Bomber [0] is sort of similar to that idea. The pilot ejected (intentionally) in a spin, but the changed center of mass leveled the plane out and it flew until it eventually landed itself in the namesake field. They knew what happened immediately in that case, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
  - snypher 3y ago
    This one made it 600 miles! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
- rasz 3y ago
  Is it possible plane was hijacked? Ejected the pilot, landed somewhere on remote control and was quickly packed into couple of trucks. Now that would be something, mother of all supply attacks! https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-stops-accepting-f-35-jets-check-chinese-content-source-2022-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-... https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/09/13/an-f-16-pilot-died-when-his-ejection-seat-failed-was-it-counterfeit/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/09/13...
djohnston 3y ago
Damn sounds like someone is losing their wings.
- 9659 3y ago
  Nope. You can eject from 2 aircraft before the military takes away your keys.
  - djohnston 3y ago
    But usually they don’t sit everyone down because of it. Unless it’s maybe something critical they think could be impacting the entire fleet. I’m so curious.
  - pintxo 3y ago
    That’s for health reasons, no? As your spine should not be subjected to a third ejection at that point. They may take yours wings for cross negligence any time.

37 points by fortran77 3y ago

It should be noted that the debris field was found for the missing fighter jet. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f-35-fighter-jet-missing-pilot-ejects-mishap-rcna105534 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f-35-fighter-jet-missin...

fortran77 3y ago
In fact, TFA notes this: > Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Ah yes, the SI unit of distance obviously being the hour. (For an aircraft mishap in particular, this is more ambiguous than usual.)
  - jedberg 3y ago
    It was probably written by a reporter based in LA, where we measure distance in hours/minutes.
    - speed_spread 3y ago
      And speed is in football fields per hour?
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        Hours per gallon, actually.
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        speed is distance over time, so obviously hours-per-hour. "Traffic was really bad; we were only going half-an-hour per hour..." The kids will shorten it in slang to just the unitless dimension. "Rick's car is really fast; we got it up over 2.5 yesterday!"
        hunter2_ 3y ago
        Oddly enough, household energy consumption is often stated in kWh/year. Being that hours per year is a bit under 10,000 one can convert this kWh/year ridiculousness onto simple W, and the resulting amount is only one order of magnitude different. But I guess it helps people annualize their their electric bill (monthly statements being in kWh) without much math.
        sokoloff 3y ago
        In the course of doing some energy improvements (and considering various options), I used the rule of the thumb that 1W continuous costs $2/yr, which was more than close enough mathematically, surely made the math easier to do in my head, and was in the units of the actual tradeoff that I was making (buy an efficiency improvement for $Y, save $Z/yr).
    - dr_kretyn 3y ago
      That seems to be generally a US thing. Many of my colleagues from Texas, Washington and Virginia tell distance in minutes/hours that they (would have) spent driving. It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". They mean that it depends on the traffic but I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
        > It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". I hadn’t noticed that before but I probably will now. That does seem to be a US thing. Often a person will respond in units of distance and time, one after the other. It does make sense given the effect that traffic conditions in a city can have on the travel time but “how far?” “it depends” is really funny. > I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space. My thought was their home is some kind of moving fortress. A city on the back of a turtle wandering along the coast.
      - mintplant 3y ago
        I think there's an implicit cultural understanding that when someone here asks how far away something is, what they really want to know is how long it will take them to drive there.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      IMO this is the case in Texas too and it honestly works a lot better there because in LA an hour is very different at 5PM and 10PM. (Still different in TX cities, but to a lesser extent and for a smaller time period.)
    - yardstick 3y ago
      Come to think about it, time vs miles/km feels more natural in most situations I can think of. In London we would describe a journey based on time (or maybe stops, but only for very short train journeys) not distance. Same for international travel- measured in flight time not distance travelled. Because in most situations knowing how far away something is takes second place to knowing how long to get there. That’s what is relevant. Now as to this crash location, I guess it means 2 hours by car but yeah it’s more ambiguous than a more widely understood journey.
  - mohn 3y ago
    Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    Two hours is a common unit for storm chasers!
  - jayd16 3y ago
    The only logical explanation is its about 150 degree minutes.
- irrational 3y ago
  two and a half hours walking? riding a bike? driving in a car? flying in a jet? traveling in the ISS?
  - mey 3y ago
    Parsecs
  - bonestamp2 3y ago
    Unladen Swallow
ftxbro 3y ago
if i'm ever in the news i never want the story to be like 'debris field was found'
mvdtnz 3y ago
The article mentions this and makes it quite clear it's not the debris of the f35. > Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base. > Two defense officials said Monday that although the jet was on autopilot when the pilot ejected, it does not have the range or ability to fly for such a long period without refueling.

turnsout 3y ago

During the stand-down, Marine commanders will distribute a Xeroxed update to the F-35 flight manual making it clear that autopilot should be disengaged prior to ejection. /s

mlinhares 3y ago

Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s? It definitely feels like the F-35 has been plagued by issues for a really long time.

ramesh31 3y ago
>Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s? Shhh. You're seeing the absurd janky house of cards that the trillion dollar online ad business really is. Their marketing CDP says you're a Pentagon official with purchasing power.
- avalys 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be perfect to be effective. So what if someone sees the wrong ad even half the time?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Ad tech was supposed to solve this. But the reality is they are selling people a rube goldberg machine that throws darts at a wall, and charging money for it like it's the Oracle of Delphi.
SonicScrub 3y ago
Not really. Large military procurement programs are always a gold-mine for the media, especially those involving new technologies (compared with design iterations). Issues, bugs, production issues, etc are inevitable, and given the large price tag associated with a program like this, the stories are easy to write. The F-35 had it's fair share of these, but now that the program has matured, the incident rate is less than it's contemporaries. It currently has one of the best safety records of US fighter jets. But F-16s don't generate the safe media buzz when they crash. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more-likely-to-crash-data/amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-...

babyshake 3y ago

Isn't it bad opsec for this to be public knowledge?

FireBeyond 3y ago
For any threat that considers the flight routines of the military, they assuredly have intel that will make them aware of this. Even down to a source by a base saying "huh, no flights took off today, odd."

mtreis86 3y ago

I wonder what the furthest an abandoned aircraft has glided before crashing.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

Politicians need to communicate that an iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 50 of them, and they still have bugs. It costs money to keep a supply chain going for rare items. Maybe a smarter approach is to build broadly useful factories that can switch on a dime during times of war, but no one has figured that out. The thing about expensive tech that gives you an advantage is that random consumers can’t afford it.

bhawks 3y ago
We have been running military operations nonstop for practically 40 years. Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together. There is little functional or healthy about the current state of affairs.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  >Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together. That's because we practically subsidize the majority of our allies' militaries.
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    That’s the quiet part we don’t want to say out loud- the rest of the western world effectively gets a free pass on military spending at our expense.
- adventured 3y ago
  Most of the US military budget is directly related to labor costs. US labor is extremely expensive in all regards, on par with some of wealthiest nations in Europe. If you properly adjust for that fact - basically do some manner of reasonable PPP adjustment - China is already spending on par with or more than the US at this point. The reason the US military budget is seemingly so massive, is because the US economy has such an extreme output per capita, at present ~$80,000 (Britain + Japan combined). Astronomical for a nation so large. ~3% of $27 trillion is not unreasonable for a superpower with global interests. Russia has given us a demonstration, again, that we in fact do need that military capability. China will probably provide another.

bhawks 3y ago

This affects all air craft not just the F35 > “During the safety stand down, aviation commanders will lead discussions with their Marines focusing on the fundamentals of safe flight operations, ground safety, maintenance and flight procedures, and maintaining combat readiness,” the statement said. It is pretty damning and disappointing that this action is warranted. Too much spending on tools and not enough on soldiers.

berkle4455 3y ago
This is mostly just how the Marine Corps fixes fuckups. LCpl Schmuckatelli gets one hooker pregnant and suddenly the entire battalion has their 96 canked, we’re all having 0700 safe-sex safety briefings Saturday morning, and Doc is handing out condoms.
TylerE 3y ago
I don't know why the military can't learn from a string of failed systems going back to at least the '80s. 1. Make Tough Requirements 2. Get Prototype 3. Prototype attracts some interest 4. Now the brass additionally wants capabilities X, Y, Z 5. Prototype now costs twice as much and is more failure prone, and actually less mission-capable due to all the bolt-ons 6. Program costs goes up due to all the changes 7. We can't afford this! 8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50% 9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D? 10. Now we REALLY can't afford this. 11. Cut orders by another 75% 12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge. 13. Program fails in the mid-to-long term due to maintenance costs and falling spares inventory. HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU
- throw0101b 3y ago
  > HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU Great in that it is entertaining, but I would not take it, or the book it was based on, completely at face value: > The Pentagon Wars was made to be a comedy first and an adaptation of the Pentagon Wars book second. It was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Bradley program and it shows. You're getting Hollywood taking an an axe-grinding, half-true memoir as fact and then playing it for laughs. * https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_just_watched_the_pentagon_wars_how_has_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j... See also perhaps: > Although the Bradley destroyed many enemy tanks and experienced fairly low rates of casualty in the First Gulf War and the Iraq War, the vehicle’s recent battlefield performance was not acquired through efficient planning and project management. The origins of the modern Bradley span decades of troubled development; the involvement of many stakeholders; inflexible and questionable requirements; a failure of contractors to make design tradeoffs for fear of losing capability; billions of dollars in R&D costs; and numerous Congressional interventions, including House Armed Service Committee hearings investigating Bradley testing protocol.1 The Bradley has been described at different times, by military officers and historians, as a weapon that means “all things to all people,” a “quintessential hybrid,” and “a proverbial camel...that does nothing well”.2 * https://user.eng.umd.edu/~austin/enes489p/lecture-resources/BradleyFightingVehicle-Scenario.pdf https://user.eng.umd.edu/~austin/enes489p/lecture-resources/...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ls612 3y ago

Is it possible that the ejection mechanism malfunctioned and ejected the pilot from a perfectly working airplane? Has such a thing happened before?

gs17 3y ago
Not exactly that, but the Cornfield Bomber [0] is sort of similar to that idea. The pilot ejected (intentionally) in a spin, but the changed center of mass leveled the plane out and it flew until it eventually landed itself in the namesake field. They knew what happened immediately in that case, though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
- snypher 3y ago
  This one made it 600 miles! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
rasz 3y ago
Is it possible plane was hijacked? Ejected the pilot, landed somewhere on remote control and was quickly packed into couple of trucks. Now that would be something, mother of all supply attacks! https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-stops-accepting-f-35-jets-check-chinese-content-source-2022-09-07/ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-... https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/09/13/an-f-16-pilot-died-when-his-ejection-seat-failed-was-it-counterfeit/ https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/09/13...

djohnston 3y ago

Damn sounds like someone is losing their wings.

9659 3y ago
Nope. You can eject from 2 aircraft before the military takes away your keys.
- djohnston 3y ago
  But usually they don’t sit everyone down because of it. Unless it’s maybe something critical they think could be impacting the entire fleet. I’m so curious.
- pintxo 3y ago
  That’s for health reasons, no? As your spine should not be subjected to a third ejection at that point. They may take yours wings for cross negligence any time.