13 ms·

A decision to eject from a failing F-35B fighter and the betrayal in its wake

247 points by po 1y ago

za3faran 1y ago
> A sign at the base entrance says, "The 'noise' you hear is the sound of freedom." And that is how they normalize their atrocities.
sieabahlpark 1y ago
[dead]
YZF 1y ago
I feel like we had a discussion of this crash in the past. Would be nice to find those threads. Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?
- jyunwai 1y ago
  Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
    Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark.. Did more information come up during the time period ? Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground. He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell the plane to switch modes from STOL to regular forward flight. He didn't see if pitch, yaw, and roll flight controls were being respected, and it doesn't seem he tried to use the backup radio, or the backup instruments, other then glancing at them. But I don't think he made a terrible decision! Ultimately he's still alive, he healed from his injuries, and no one else was hurt, and that's a good outcome in my opinion. But maybe his judgment in a crisis situation isn't good enough for the command position he was given. He did lose a $165M piece of equipment, one that he very well may have been able land safely, and while I would never place that above the lives of actual humans, it does matter. And that's really what the three reports said: many other pilots probably would have done what he did in that situation, but he should have taken more time to ascertain whether his plane was flyable or not, even if that would have put him at further risk. Maybe he would have been fine continuing to be a test pilot under the command of someone else's test group, but maybe his superiors decided that his actions showed he wasn't the kind of person they wanted in command. I dunno; I've never been a Marine (or any kind of military officer), so I don't know either way. But I suspect most of us here haven't, and don't really have expert knowledge on how these sorts of things are supposed to work.
      - travisgriggs 1y ago
        > He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Are you sure about this? It takes a lot of time and hours to get a pilot to the point they can probe the edges that test pilots do. The whole goal is to actually keep them alive so their experience and observations can be used. And that just compounds. So while they fly maneuvers and situations that would absolutely overwhelm me as a 300 hour private pilot in my Tecnam, my feeling is that even at that point they fly at less relative risk than I do. They are experts in mitigating, and preparing for risk. There are old pilots and bold pilots. I do not believe that being a test pilot is a mandate that forces one to transfer to the bold club.
- avidiax 1y ago
  My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail". They needed to blame the pilot, and certainly didn't need anyone familiar with the defects of the plane in a prominent command or as a general. So they fire the guy, and promote someone else that can be relied on to say that the F-35 has no more defects than any other plane had at this point in the program, and we can trust the US military industrial complex to deliver the F-47 in a similar fashion. At the same time, you send a message: eject when your plane is misbehaving and you'll end your career. Sure, there's a risk that someone won't eject when they should, but there's also a chance that you'll be able to cover up another malfunction when the pilot nurses the plane back to base. Did Pizzo say anything disparaging about the F-35? I doubt it. But when you've got billions of dollars of revenue/potential embarrassment on the line, you don't take chances.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail" Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. US has killed the allies trust. Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.
      - kelnos 1y ago
        > the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. Could you provide some references to this? A quick search only turned up denials that such a kill switch exists.
        pjmlp 1y ago
        https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-reportedly-suspended-support-for-the-electronic-warfare-systems-installed-on-the-ukrainian-air-forces-f-16-fighter-jets/ https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-repor...
bgc 1y ago
https://archive.is/192Wu https://archive.is/192Wu
zeroq 1y ago
So which one actually ejected? Tre or Cheez?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
russellbeattie 1y ago
Seems like there was already a thread about this. But after reading the article, my one takeaway is this: Pilots can decide in less than a minute to bail out of a fighter jet aimed at who knows what and that's OK?? I don't expect every pilot to go down with their plane, but holy crap. That plane could have taken out half a street of houses. I'm not sure how one pilot's life is worth more than potentially dozens of innocent people who happen to be living under a plane's flight path. It's a miracle the plane landed in a swamp, of all places. Especially given how long it was in the air flying around on its own. Pretty much anywhere else besides the open ocean and it could have been an epic disaster. I'm sure this has been expressed in the other thread, but I figured I'd share my shock for the others just reading about this now.
- bradgranath 1y ago
  It's much, much less than a minute. Usually less than ten seconds. Planes most commonly crash during takeoff and landing (why they turn on the seatbelt sign below 10000ft). The FAA tries to make sure that approach lanes are mostly clear, but they can't plan for every scenario. In this case the pilot knew that last time he checked, he was less than a thousand feet off the ground and descending in a plane that was out of his control with no comms (if you want to blame someone, how bout Lockheed?). He's suppose to spend the next five seconds doing... what exactly? This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    He's supposed to spend the next 5 seconds actually testing the flight controls to see what's working and what isn't. He's supposed to look at the backup instruments to see what his status is. He's supposed to try the backup radio to see if someone outside can help him figure out his status. Instead, he switched the flight mode from STOL to forward flight, misinterpreted the result of that as his engine spooling down, didn't see if he could maneuver the aircraft, didn't do anything with the backup instruments except glance at them, didn't try the backup radio, and punched out. Sure, he was descending. Did he try to pull up? Did he look at the backup instruments while doing so to see if their response to that agreed with his actions, and thus gain some information as to whether both the flight controls and backup instruments were functional? Seems like he didn't. I'm not saying I would have made a different decision in his situation. I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like. But it sounds like that third mishap report, as well as the Marine brass, believed he should have known that he had more time to ascertain his plane's capabilities at the time. > This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for. He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper. Yes, it seems, even in a crisis situation where he might die if he delays his decisions for too long. And I'm not saying he absolutely should have gone down with the plane if that's what would have happened. But also consider that it seems like a near miracle that the plane didn't eventually come down in a residential area, for instance, and kill a bunch of people, especially considering how long it continued flying after he ejected. It sounds like he only considered that after he was on the ground. He needed to be thinking about that before he pulled that ejection lever.
mmaunder 1y ago
I think there are many other moving parts in this story that aren’t public knowledge.
- gscott 1y ago
  Mostly the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an airplane that's not ready for prime time yet.
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    The F-35B entered service ten years ago, in 2015. But there have been continuous upgrades to it, and given that the 2023 incident described in the article started with the HUD (apparently) crashing 3 times in a row, there's plenty of room for improvement.
spoonjim 1y ago
It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject. Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.
- sneak 1y ago
  Implicit in this view is that a pilot’s life has a cash value and that value is something less than “hundreds of millions of dollars” or a single digit multiple thereof. The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD. He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled. How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.
  - aussiethebob 1y ago
    I think the plane is only $136M in the context of the overall program and it's projected number of planes built over the program lifespan. The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.
  - spoonjim 1y ago
    Of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve objectives.
- eCa 1y ago
  The only thing such a policy leads to is losing pilots, either by them not ditching when they should or them leaving a toxic work environment.
- condensedcrab 1y ago
renewiltord 1y ago
The entire story is pretty interesting, actually. When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while Then the military said the reason they had to demote him was that while a normal pilot could have done what he did, he was a test pilot and they're supposed to run closer to the redline. Overall, that combined with the contemporaneous Secret Service gaffes that nearly had the President whacked while they stood around in photo-op poses, really made me think: What if these people are all playing at their roles and they don't actually know what to do? I know it's general Millennial jokes that "nobody knows what they're doing; we're all just making it up as we go along". But that's not true. I kind of know a lot of what I'm doing. There's a whole bunch of things where I can just execute with low error rate. These guys are doing something more important and their ancestors did it better. Which makes me think that they're not so good at what they do.
- stevage 1y ago
  > (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are. The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pilot isn't doing a good job of saying "don't worry about me, let's talk about the plane". He keeps chiming in with these questions about the plane crash that seem to come out of nowhere. He also doesn't even mention that he's concerned that the plane crash might have injured someone else. Maybe there's more to this that was edited out. But I'm not sure what the criticism is: she's supposed to stop asking questions about his injuries, and suddenly ask about a possible plane crash that they haven't had any reports of yet? What would that even achieve?
  - chgs 1y ago
    I suspect an average dispatcher is an order magnitude more likely to have someone reporting they crashed a plane than actually did crash a plane.
kelnos 1y ago
This was discussed four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore. He didn't try to see if his flight controls (pitch, yaw, roll) were still responding, he didn't make use of the backup instruments, he didn't try the backup radio, and he had enough fuel to land elsewhere. The letter of the procedures may have said that he was in an out-of-control flight condition, but the procedures were too vague, and he should have had the experience to second-guess them and ascertain if his plane was actually out of control. Sure, maybe all those things wouldn't have worked, and he would have had to eject. Or worse, they wouldn't have worked, and he would have spent enough time trying them that it would have been too late and he would have died. But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter: the plane was still flyable, and either a) he would have likely been able to successfully land, possibly at an alternate location with better weather, or b) he would have had the time and flight stability to try a bunch more options before deciding to eject. I do find the circumstances strange, in how long it took for Marine brass to decide to relieve him of his command and torpedo his career. But I have no frame of reference for or experience around this, so perhaps it's not unusual. If he were just a rank-and-file pilot, he likely would have kept his position and continued on, perhaps with a bit of a bumpy road ahead. But he was given the command of an important group, a group tasked to refine flight procedures around this plane, and that comes with different expectations for his actions in the scenario he was in.
- _cs2017_ 1y ago
  "But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter" -- curious what you mean by that?
  - gtsop 1y ago
    He means that he prefers for that poor lad to have died trying to save a piece of metal. Simple stuff, there is no going around it. For some people money is above human life.
    - 1y ago
sneak 1y ago
Maybe this will start to teach people that being a cog in a giant machine that only pretends to care about you (while really doing everything to put you in service to its own strategic goals of mass murder) isn’t really a great life decision. More high profile stories like this would be great, in my view. The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyovers are paid advertising to the NFL/NCAA by the military) to make it seem like you’ll be some sort of glorious hero if you join up. > 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. I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
- gtsop 1y ago
  > I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them. I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this conclusion is to help us think about similar situations in other settings than the US air force. It is like a philosophical dilema, should you punish someone for trying to save their life and causing damage that could have been avoided? Not everyone answers the same. Again I agree with your angle, it's perfectly valid
  - sneak 1y ago
    Yeah, it is something different, but this is a story about a guy who dedicated his life to something, and then lost everything he worked for. I think the question about “is that something anyone should be working for?” is just as important as “was it fair to the one so working?”.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5. Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations because most other pilots would have interpreted the situation similarly, promoted, and then fired less than 4 months after moving with his family to the location of his new role. It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen as the most likely explanation, with all the risks it entails (pilots becoming more hesitant to eject or openly admit mistakes so safety can be improved).
- tetris11 1y ago
  I came here to say exactly the same
- stevage 1y ago
  I feel like in previous reporting I'd seen suggestions that the other pilots had lost confidence in him, and that you couldn't be the leader of a squadron if any of the pilots had any doubts. This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.
  - motorest 1y ago
    > This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story. The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility. One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior. This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass. I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.
whatever1 1y ago
I mean if the air force is so uncomfortable with soldiers surviving while the $150M gadget bursts into flames, why do they even request for an ejection function in the aircrafts?
- blatantly 1y ago
  Cynical take would be it is a free soldier behind enemy lines.
  - guappa 1y ago
    I sincerely have any doubt they will ever actually use one against a country that has any military capability, because of what the PR would be if it gets shot down.
- xlii 1y ago
  Good PR I guess? Highest level specialists have demands. I fail to see how top pilots would agree to sit in suicide machines. Article mention 1/10 critical failure rate (injuries or worse). I wonder how much of a push is made in this direction? Given (implied in article) sentiment I wouldn’t be very surprised if stakeholders wouldn’t want ejection to be too safe.
instagib 1y ago
They had one short sentence in there that he still had a tiny alternate primary flight display. Still had control surfaces. He knew he was descending and his authorized air space. Pull up, look at the pfd, do some resets, follow helmet malfunction protocols. There was very little about a devils advocate side to the story. I could imagine others joking about ejecting for minor warnings or trolling him. Especially in the marines. Do a FOIA on all ejections because his is just one. He had a good 27 year career and ended as a colonel with retirement benefits.
- blobbers 1y ago
  I think this was just a story, less an investigation. It's basically his view, the lack of closure, and the result.
- TomK32 1y ago
  Even if he would have trusted the alternative controls the jet has, he was in clouds over a densely populated area going 350mph just 750 feet above the ground, far below the 6000 feet the article quotes from the manual. "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.”"
  - rob74 1y ago
    Well, that's the crux of the issue: apparently the aircraft still did respond properly to pilot inputs. Of course, it's totally understandable to get spooked by all the electronics failing and decide to rather bail out than bet on the plane still being flyable, but if you go by the book, he shouldn't have ejected...
    - chopin 1y ago
      You can't know whether the plane responds correctly to your inputs under instrument conditions when you can't trust the instruments.
AndyMcConachie 1y ago
$2 trillion to develop something that can't even dependably fly and the Pentagon can't even pass an audit. What a joke.
- dgroshev 1y ago
  $2t is the price tag of the entire program [1], from its conception to the jets retiring decades from now (note that programs tend to get extended, so the retirement year is probably too pessimistic). For comparison, the US is still producing F-16s, with the first F-16 produced in 1976. F-35s has a much lower crash rate than F-16s during their first 20 years in service [2] and just recently passed 1 million flight hours [3]. The program has its problems, but it resulted in an incredibly capable fighter plane. Practically every US ally that has access to the F-35 run their evaluations and concluded that the F-35 is the best option (eg [4], quote: "F-35A offers highest overall benefit at lowest cost by far"). [1]: https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-military-plans-fly-it-less https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-mil... [2]: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more-likely-to-crash-data https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more... [3]: https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-flight-hours/ https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-fligh... [4]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-84275.html https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...
kopirgan 1y ago
The pilot, del Pizzo himself seems to have realised upon return to flying, the sound of engine dying he heard was actually the thrust engine not the main one. Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed. Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess
- jpgvm 1y ago
  Losing all instruments with no visibility is still ejectable even if he thought the engine was still running. He was disorientated and relying on his instruments, when flying under IFR (instrument flight rules) loss of instruments is tantamount to loss of control. The likely outcome in those situations is controlled flight into terrain at 350+mph. With low altitude being an aggravating factor he was always 100% correct in ejecting and whatever the plane did afterwards is largely irrelevant.
  - kopirgan 1y ago
    Yes 750m doesn't give much room for errors or time
    - rcakebread 1y ago
      It was 750 feet, not meters. So much less room.
      - jpgvm 1y ago
        Even if he held the glide without visibility (harder than it sounds) he would have had less than 60s before eating dirt (rate of descent was ~800ft/min).
charlie90 1y ago
Im not a pilot or anything, but looking at the cockpit of the f35, it seems pretty weird that the whole thing is a big touch screen. Reminds me of cars replacing physical controls with touchscreens...
- mohsen1 1y ago
  Plus it's running Kubernetes for all of that! https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/ https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
  - echoangle 1y ago
    I didn't watch the video but the article only mentions the F-16, not the F-35.
rpigab 1y ago
Saying the pilot did nothing wrong means the plane did something wrong; sell less expansive planes to foreign countries. Throw him under the bus; sell more expansive planes. I hear America is looking for efficiency and reduced gvt spendings, I'd say the F35 program is a good candidate to start, especially since now many countries aren't so fond of the whole "send all of your military data to our best friends the US of A".
- preisschild 1y ago
  The F-35 would be a horrible place to start, because it is actually the best multirole jet fighter you can buy and gives you a massive advantage
  - rpigab 1y ago
    Assuming it is the best when the private servers are controlled by someone who lets you use it, is it still the best when that connection is severed or when trust is broken by the nation controlling the servers, data and code? What if some president decides your nation's airstrike is not to his taste and... cancels it? What will you do then, tweet angrily about it, ask for a refund? Talking of course primarily about ODIN/ALIS. I'd take a bicycle without electronics over an electric vehicle that decides not to start, any day, when picking military hardware.
krunck 1y ago
He wasn't loyal enough to the brand to not eject. The top brass in the F-35 project didn't like that. They needed to blame the pilot rather than the faulty machine in order to protect Lockheed Martin's and their own reputation.

247 points by po 1y ago

> A sign at the base entrance says, "The 'noise' you hear is the sound of freedom." And that is how they normalize their atrocities.

sieabahlpark 1y ago

[dead]

YZF 1y ago

I feel like we had a discussion of this crash in the past. Would be nice to find those threads. Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?

jyunwai 1y ago
Past discussion from November 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475
- makeitdouble 1y ago
  Going through the past threads, a lot of comments are about how the backup instruments were still on and functioning, while in this article he's said to have 0 visibility and no idea what is still accurately working and what is not, with no possible communication and the HUD rebooting 3 times before going dark.. Did more information come up during the time period ? Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
  - kelnos 1y ago
    He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Not just that -- and this is something the (current) article touched on -- he is also supposed to consider that ejecting could mean his plane crashing somewhere where it's going to kill one or more people; it seems he only considered that after he was on the ground. He didn't know what was working because he didn't try to figure it out. All he did was tell the plane to switch modes from STOL to regular forward flight. He didn't see if pitch, yaw, and roll flight controls were being respected, and it doesn't seem he tried to use the backup radio, or the backup instruments, other then glancing at them. But I don't think he made a terrible decision! Ultimately he's still alive, he healed from his injuries, and no one else was hurt, and that's a good outcome in my opinion. But maybe his judgment in a crisis situation isn't good enough for the command position he was given. He did lose a $165M piece of equipment, one that he very well may have been able land safely, and while I would never place that above the lives of actual humans, it does matter. And that's really what the three reports said: many other pilots probably would have done what he did in that situation, but he should have taken more time to ascertain whether his plane was flyable or not, even if that would have put him at further risk. Maybe he would have been fine continuing to be a test pilot under the command of someone else's test group, but maybe his superiors decided that his actions showed he wasn't the kind of person they wanted in command. I dunno; I've never been a Marine (or any kind of military officer), so I don't know either way. But I suspect most of us here haven't, and don't really have expert knowledge on how these sorts of things are supposed to work.
    - travisgriggs 1y ago
      > He was a test pilot; he's supposed to put his life at risk. Are you sure about this? It takes a lot of time and hours to get a pilot to the point they can probe the edges that test pilots do. The whole goal is to actually keep them alive so their experience and observations can be used. And that just compounds. So while they fly maneuvers and situations that would absolutely overwhelm me as a 300 hour private pilot in my Tecnam, my feeling is that even at that point they fly at less relative risk than I do. They are experts in mitigating, and preparing for risk. There are old pilots and bold pilots. I do not believe that being a test pilot is a mandate that forces one to transfer to the bold club.
avidiax 1y ago
My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail". They needed to blame the pilot, and certainly didn't need anyone familiar with the defects of the plane in a prominent command or as a general. So they fire the guy, and promote someone else that can be relied on to say that the F-35 has no more defects than any other plane had at this point in the program, and we can trust the US military industrial complex to deliver the F-47 in a similar fashion. At the same time, you send a message: eject when your plane is misbehaving and you'll end your career. Sure, there's a risk that someone won't eject when they should, but there's also a chance that you'll be able to cover up another malfunction when the pilot nurses the plane back to base. Did Pizzo say anything disparaging about the F-35? I doubt it. But when you've got billions of dollars of revenue/potential embarrassment on the line, you don't take chances.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail" Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. US has killed the allies trust. Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.
    - kelnos 1y ago
      > the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. Could you provide some references to this? A quick search only turned up denials that such a kill switch exists.
      - pjmlp 1y ago
        https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-reportedly-suspended-support-for-the-electronic-warfare-systems-installed-on-the-ukrainian-air-forces-f-16-fighter-jets/ https://www.zona-militar.com/en/2025/03/10/the-u-s-has-repor...

bgc 1y ago

https://archive.is/192Wu https://archive.is/192Wu

zeroq 1y ago

So which one actually ejected? Tre or Cheez?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

russellbeattie 1y ago

Seems like there was already a thread about this. But after reading the article, my one takeaway is this: Pilots can decide in less than a minute to bail out of a fighter jet aimed at who knows what and that's OK?? I don't expect every pilot to go down with their plane, but holy crap. That plane could have taken out half a street of houses. I'm not sure how one pilot's life is worth more than potentially dozens of innocent people who happen to be living under a plane's flight path. It's a miracle the plane landed in a swamp, of all places. Especially given how long it was in the air flying around on its own. Pretty much anywhere else besides the open ocean and it could have been an epic disaster. I'm sure this has been expressed in the other thread, but I figured I'd share my shock for the others just reading about this now.

bradgranath 1y ago
It's much, much less than a minute. Usually less than ten seconds. Planes most commonly crash during takeoff and landing (why they turn on the seatbelt sign below 10000ft). The FAA tries to make sure that approach lanes are mostly clear, but they can't plan for every scenario. In this case the pilot knew that last time he checked, he was less than a thousand feet off the ground and descending in a plane that was out of his control with no comms (if you want to blame someone, how bout Lockheed?). He's suppose to spend the next five seconds doing... what exactly? This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
- kelnos 1y ago
  He's supposed to spend the next 5 seconds actually testing the flight controls to see what's working and what isn't. He's supposed to look at the backup instruments to see what his status is. He's supposed to try the backup radio to see if someone outside can help him figure out his status. Instead, he switched the flight mode from STOL to forward flight, misinterpreted the result of that as his engine spooling down, didn't see if he could maneuver the aircraft, didn't do anything with the backup instruments except glance at them, didn't try the backup radio, and punched out. Sure, he was descending. Did he try to pull up? Did he look at the backup instruments while doing so to see if their response to that agreed with his actions, and thus gain some information as to whether both the flight controls and backup instruments were functional? Seems like he didn't. I'm not saying I would have made a different decision in his situation. I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like. But it sounds like that third mishap report, as well as the Marine brass, believed he should have known that he had more time to ascertain his plane's capabilities at the time. > This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for. He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper. Yes, it seems, even in a crisis situation where he might die if he delays his decisions for too long. And I'm not saying he absolutely should have gone down with the plane if that's what would have happened. But also consider that it seems like a near miracle that the plane didn't eventually come down in a residential area, for instance, and kill a bunch of people, especially considering how long it continued flying after he ejected. It sounds like he only considered that after he was on the ground. He needed to be thinking about that before he pulled that ejection lever.

mmaunder 1y ago

I think there are many other moving parts in this story that aren’t public knowledge.

gscott 1y ago
Mostly the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on an airplane that's not ready for prime time yet.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  The F-35B entered service ten years ago, in 2015. But there have been continuous upgrades to it, and given that the 2023 incident described in the article started with the HUD (apparently) crashing 3 times in a row, there's plenty of room for improvement.

spoonjim 1y ago

It's not a bad practice to automatically dismiss any pilot who ejects from a plane (other than test pilots) except in cases which are wholly obvious equipment failures. It will ensure that for these planes which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the pilot doesn't eject unless, yes, they really fucking need to eject. Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.

sneak 1y ago
Implicit in this view is that a pilot’s life has a cash value and that value is something less than “hundreds of millions of dollars” or a single digit multiple thereof. The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD. He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled. How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.
- aussiethebob 1y ago
  I think the plane is only $136M in the context of the overall program and it's projected number of planes built over the program lifespan. The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.
- spoonjim 1y ago
  Of all places, the military is quite explicit about using human lives as expendable resources to achieve objectives.
eCa 1y ago
The only thing such a policy leads to is losing pilots, either by them not ditching when they should or them leaving a toxic work environment.
condensedcrab 1y ago

renewiltord 1y ago

The entire story is pretty interesting, actually. When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while Then the military said the reason they had to demote him was that while a normal pilot could have done what he did, he was a test pilot and they're supposed to run closer to the redline. Overall, that combined with the contemporaneous Secret Service gaffes that nearly had the President whacked while they stood around in photo-op poses, really made me think: What if these people are all playing at their roles and they don't actually know what to do? I know it's general Millennial jokes that "nobody knows what they're doing; we're all just making it up as we go along". But that's not true. I kind of know a lot of what I'm doing. There's a whole bunch of things where I can just execute with low error rate. These guys are doing something more important and their ancestors did it better. Which makes me think that they're not so good at what they do.

stevage 1y ago
> (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are. The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pilot isn't doing a good job of saying "don't worry about me, let's talk about the plane". He keeps chiming in with these questions about the plane crash that seem to come out of nowhere. He also doesn't even mention that he's concerned that the plane crash might have injured someone else. Maybe there's more to this that was edited out. But I'm not sure what the criticism is: she's supposed to stop asking questions about his injuries, and suddenly ask about a possible plane crash that they haven't had any reports of yet? What would that even achieve?
- chgs 1y ago
  I suspect an average dispatcher is an order magnitude more likely to have someone reporting they crashed a plane than actually did crash a plane.

kelnos 1y ago

This was discussed four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore. He didn't try to see if his flight controls (pitch, yaw, roll) were still responding, he didn't make use of the backup instruments, he didn't try the backup radio, and he had enough fuel to land elsewhere. The letter of the procedures may have said that he was in an out-of-control flight condition, but the procedures were too vague, and he should have had the experience to second-guess them and ascertain if his plane was actually out of control. Sure, maybe all those things wouldn't have worked, and he would have had to eject. Or worse, they wouldn't have worked, and he would have spent enough time trying them that it would have been too late and he would have died. But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter: the plane was still flyable, and either a) he would have likely been able to successfully land, possibly at an alternate location with better weather, or b) he would have had the time and flight stability to try a bunch more options before deciding to eject. I do find the circumstances strange, in how long it took for Marine brass to decide to relieve him of his command and torpedo his career. But I have no frame of reference for or experience around this, so perhaps it's not unusual. If he were just a rank-and-file pilot, he likely would have kept his position and continued on, perhaps with a bit of a bumpy road ahead. But he was given the command of an important group, a group tasked to refine flight procedures around this plane, and that comes with different expectations for his actions in the scenario he was in.

_cs2017_ 1y ago
"But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter" -- curious what you mean by that?
- gtsop 1y ago
  He means that he prefers for that poor lad to have died trying to save a piece of metal. Simple stuff, there is no going around it. For some people money is above human life.
  - 1y ago

sneak 1y ago

Maybe this will start to teach people that being a cog in a giant machine that only pretends to care about you (while really doing everything to put you in service to its own strategic goals of mass murder) isn’t really a great life decision. More high profile stories like this would be great, in my view. The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyovers are paid advertising to the NFL/NCAA by the military) to make it seem like you’ll be some sort of glorious hero if you join up. > 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. I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.

gtsop 1y ago
> I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them. I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this conclusion is to help us think about similar situations in other settings than the US air force. It is like a philosophical dilema, should you punish someone for trying to save their life and causing damage that could have been avoided? Not everyone answers the same. Again I agree with your angle, it's perfectly valid
- sneak 1y ago
  Yeah, it is something different, but this is a story about a guy who dedicated his life to something, and then lost everything he worked for. I think the question about “is that something anyone should be working for?” is just as important as “was it fair to the one so working?”.

tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago

If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5. Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations because most other pilots would have interpreted the situation similarly, promoted, and then fired less than 4 months after moving with his family to the location of his new role. It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen as the most likely explanation, with all the risks it entails (pilots becoming more hesitant to eject or openly admit mistakes so safety can be improved).

tetris11 1y ago
I came here to say exactly the same
stevage 1y ago
I feel like in previous reporting I'd seen suggestions that the other pilots had lost confidence in him, and that you couldn't be the leader of a squadron if any of the pilots had any doubts. This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.
- motorest 1y ago
  > This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story. The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility. One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior. This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass. I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.

whatever1 1y ago

I mean if the air force is so uncomfortable with soldiers surviving while the $150M gadget bursts into flames, why do they even request for an ejection function in the aircrafts?

blatantly 1y ago
Cynical take would be it is a free soldier behind enemy lines.
- guappa 1y ago
  I sincerely have any doubt they will ever actually use one against a country that has any military capability, because of what the PR would be if it gets shot down.
xlii 1y ago
Good PR I guess? Highest level specialists have demands. I fail to see how top pilots would agree to sit in suicide machines. Article mention 1/10 critical failure rate (injuries or worse). I wonder how much of a push is made in this direction? Given (implied in article) sentiment I wouldn’t be very surprised if stakeholders wouldn’t want ejection to be too safe.

instagib 1y ago

They had one short sentence in there that he still had a tiny alternate primary flight display. Still had control surfaces. He knew he was descending and his authorized air space. Pull up, look at the pfd, do some resets, follow helmet malfunction protocols. There was very little about a devils advocate side to the story. I could imagine others joking about ejecting for minor warnings or trolling him. Especially in the marines. Do a FOIA on all ejections because his is just one. He had a good 27 year career and ended as a colonel with retirement benefits.

blobbers 1y ago
I think this was just a story, less an investigation. It's basically his view, the lack of closure, and the result.
TomK32 1y ago
Even if he would have trusted the alternative controls the jet has, he was in clouds over a densely populated area going 350mph just 750 feet above the ground, far below the 6000 feet the article quotes from the manual. "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.”"
- rob74 1y ago
  Well, that's the crux of the issue: apparently the aircraft still did respond properly to pilot inputs. Of course, it's totally understandable to get spooked by all the electronics failing and decide to rather bail out than bet on the plane still being flyable, but if you go by the book, he shouldn't have ejected...
  - chopin 1y ago
    You can't know whether the plane responds correctly to your inputs under instrument conditions when you can't trust the instruments.

AndyMcConachie 1y ago

$2 trillion to develop something that can't even dependably fly and the Pentagon can't even pass an audit. What a joke.

dgroshev 1y ago
$2t is the price tag of the entire program [1], from its conception to the jets retiring decades from now (note that programs tend to get extended, so the retirement year is probably too pessimistic). For comparison, the US is still producing F-16s, with the first F-16 produced in 1976. F-35s has a much lower crash rate than F-16s during their first 20 years in service [2] and just recently passed 1 million flight hours [3]. The program has its problems, but it resulted in an incredibly capable fighter plane. Practically every US ally that has access to the F-35 run their evaluations and concluded that the F-35 is the best option (eg [4], quote: "F-35A offers highest overall benefit at lowest cost by far"). [1]: https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-military-plans-fly-it-less https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-mil... [2]: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more-likely-to-crash-data https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more... [3]: https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-flight-hours/ https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-fligh... [4]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releases.msg-id-84275.html https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...

kopirgan 1y ago

The pilot, del Pizzo himself seems to have realised upon return to flying, the sound of engine dying he heard was actually the thrust engine not the main one. Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed. Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess

jpgvm 1y ago
Losing all instruments with no visibility is still ejectable even if he thought the engine was still running. He was disorientated and relying on his instruments, when flying under IFR (instrument flight rules) loss of instruments is tantamount to loss of control. The likely outcome in those situations is controlled flight into terrain at 350+mph. With low altitude being an aggravating factor he was always 100% correct in ejecting and whatever the plane did afterwards is largely irrelevant.
- kopirgan 1y ago
  Yes 750m doesn't give much room for errors or time
  - rcakebread 1y ago
    It was 750 feet, not meters. So much less room.
    - jpgvm 1y ago
      Even if he held the glide without visibility (harder than it sounds) he would have had less than 60s before eating dirt (rate of descent was ~800ft/min).

charlie90 1y ago

Im not a pilot or anything, but looking at the cockpit of the f35, it seems pretty weird that the whole thing is a big touch screen. Reminds me of cars replacing physical controls with touchscreens...

mohsen1 1y ago
Plus it's running Kubernetes for all of that! https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/ https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
- echoangle 1y ago
  I didn't watch the video but the article only mentions the F-16, not the F-35.

rpigab 1y ago

Saying the pilot did nothing wrong means the plane did something wrong; sell less expansive planes to foreign countries. Throw him under the bus; sell more expansive planes. I hear America is looking for efficiency and reduced gvt spendings, I'd say the F35 program is a good candidate to start, especially since now many countries aren't so fond of the whole "send all of your military data to our best friends the US of A".

preisschild 1y ago
The F-35 would be a horrible place to start, because it is actually the best multirole jet fighter you can buy and gives you a massive advantage
- rpigab 1y ago
  Assuming it is the best when the private servers are controlled by someone who lets you use it, is it still the best when that connection is severed or when trust is broken by the nation controlling the servers, data and code? What if some president decides your nation's airstrike is not to his taste and... cancels it? What will you do then, tweet angrily about it, ask for a refund? Talking of course primarily about ODIN/ALIS. I'd take a bicycle without electronics over an electric vehicle that decides not to start, any day, when picking military hardware.

krunck 1y ago

He wasn't loyal enough to the brand to not eject. The top brass in the F-35 project didn't like that. They needed to blame the pilot rather than the faulty machine in order to protect Lockheed Martin's and their own reputation.