https://archive.is/192Wu

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).

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.

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?

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 (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.

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.

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

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.

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

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...

This was discussed four months ago: 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.

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.

> A sign at the base entrance says, "The 'noise' you hear is the sound of freedom."

And that is how they normalize their atrocities.

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".

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

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?

So which one actually ejected? Tre or Cheez?

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.