> Why did the pilot eject? Probably an equipment failure that put him into an unrecoverable situation. This could be any number of things, many of them not th

> Why did the pilot eject? Probably an equipment failure that put him into an unrecoverable situation. This could be any number of things, many of them not the fault of the pilot, such as engine failure from a bird strike. > Why was he flying in the first place? Pilots need hundreds of hours on their airplanes annually. Air force pilots aren't just flying missions. If you want to get good F-35 pilots you need pilots flying the F-35. > Why wasn't the flight being tracked before the ejection? Why wasn't it tracked after? It likely was. Loss of contact could be related to the equipment failure. The pilot mentioned he abandoned the aircraft at 2000ft. This is a very low altitude, in a mountainous region of the United States. Loss of contact could also be related to that. If the jet was on fire due to equipment failure, avionics could have been damaged to the point of inoperability before the air frame failed, and it could glide for some time possibly. > This is all weird and there seems to be a lot of excuses like "system behaved as intended" (paraphrase). A lot of the F-35 is still classified. If you're expecting a solid answer I think you'll be disappointed. > What if some random person took a bunch of photos of the classified systems and uploaded them somewhere, unaware or not? Oopsie.