US Asks for Help Finding Missing F-35 Fighter Jet After Crash (bloomberg.com) 103
The United States' military is on the hunt for an F-35 fighter jet that has gone missing following an incident that forced the pilot to eject from the advanced stealth aircraft over South Carolina. Bloomberg News: Emergency response teams are trying to find what's left of the F-35B Lightning II jet, which suffered what the military called a "mishap" on Sunday afternoon, according to social media posts by Joint Base Charleston, an air base in South Carolina. The unidentified pilot ejected safely and was taken to a local hospital in a stable condition. Joint Base Charleston called on the public to cooperate with military and civilian authorities as the search for the F-35 jet continues. The air base said it was working with Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort to search for the plane north of North Charleston around Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, based on its last-known location.
Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer behind the F-35, a single-seat fighter craft used by militaries around the world. The aircraft was a vertical take-off version used by in the US Marine Corps, and the jet is popular for its stealth qualities that make it difficult to detect by radar. The F-35 program, the most expensive US weapons program ever, is projected to cost $400 billion in development and acquisition, plus an additional $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years. Each jet can cost more than $160 million, depending on the variant.
Lockheed Martin is the manufacturer behind the F-35, a single-seat fighter craft used by militaries around the world. The aircraft was a vertical take-off version used by in the US Marine Corps, and the jet is popular for its stealth qualities that make it difficult to detect by radar. The F-35 program, the most expensive US weapons program ever, is projected to cost $400 billion in development and acquisition, plus an additional $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years. Each jet can cost more than $160 million, depending on the variant.
It's a trap! (Score:3, Funny)
Also, that tip line/email is going to be 99% trolling like "it's in Mexico with the fossilized ayyyy lmaos" and pics of the jet photoshopped poorly into a wormhole.
Re:It's a trap! (Score:5, Funny)
Also, just saying, if I find it, fuck off im keeping it. It's not an F-22, and sure it would be a fixer-upper...
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It is an F35. It is really REALLY good at hiding from things like radar and satellites.
It's so good that even as a pile of smoking debris, you still can't find it.
From my understanding the ejection didnt lead to the sudden crash of the jet, but it maintained autopilot and continued flying...
Which (a) is pretty amazing and (b) begs the question of why the pilot ejected. I'm sure there will be some conversations about that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not judging the pilot (no doubt it was a split second decision) but perhaps we need to update our criteria about when it's appropriate to eject.
Re:It's a trap! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Are they going to garnish the pilot's wages until he pays it back?
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It's not invisible to the naked eye, though. At high altitude this wouldn't matter, but planes don't crash into the ground at high altitude (unless there are mountains, and Charleston is on the opposite side of South Carolina from where the mountains are). The area in question (around the two lakes mentioned) is _relatively_ developed. I mean, it's not an urban concrete jungle, but based on a quick look at Google
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It could have easily flown itself out into the Atlantic. Why don't you tell them they should have no trouble finding, they'll listen to you.
Re:It's a trap! (Score:5, Informative)
Nah, it's kind of like misplacing your invisibilty cloak. You know it's in the house somewhere.
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Maybe they're making a big splash in the news to convince people that it's so good at hiding, even they can't find it!
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Like my invisible unicorn. I only know it got into my house because I keep stepping in invisible piles of rainbow poo. No, I'm not off my meds, why are you asking?
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Nah, it's kind of like misplacing your invisibilty cloak. You know it's in the house somewhere.
No one put an Apple Air Tag on board?
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I'm not from USA and don't know the terrain, but I assume if it crashed into the ground it'd be fairly easy to find. There'd be some smoke or something. TFA mentions lakes, so presumably it's at the bottom of one of them. That would likely make it difficult to locate.
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Not really that difficult, there would be oil slicks and floating fragments of seats and the like. It's not the Alaskan wilderness, all of those lakes have houses around them and boaters/fishermen even on weekdays.
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"They have drones, satellites, radar, come on"
So do the Chinese, etc.
If they wanted to just entice them in, no need for a public treasure hunt announcement at all, if what you say makes it so simple to locate.
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It's not a trap, it's propaganda.
They know exactly where it is, but they are trying to convince our adversaries that the stealth tech is that good. And convince the public it is worth the price tag and issues.
When 'stealth' backfies? (Score:1)
Re:When 'stealth' backfies? (Score:5, Funny)
I swear my wallet and keys have stealth technology in them as well...
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Did someone hack it (Score:2)
Did someone hack the autopilot and force the human pilot to eject?
F35B is the VSTOL version - it could land anywhere, not just on a runway...
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Re:Did someone hack it (Score:4, Funny)
Did someone hack the autopilot and force the human pilot to eject? F35B is the VSTOL version - it could land anywhere, not just on a runway...
By Jove! I think you've stumbled across the plot for the next James Bond movie!
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Title: "Never Say Never Again Again"
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Sentence is too long for a Jame Bond movie plot.
Re: Did someone hack it (Score:2)
wopr tried to take control and the pilot pulled th (Score:4, Funny)
wopr tried to take control and the pilot pulled the beakers to kill all power
I blame aliens (Score:2)
clearly the pilot didn't want to go too ;)
Re:Did someone hack it (Score:5, Insightful)
I would think that they would have complete separation between the ejection seat and any remote interface, specifically because of the risk of an enemy finding an exploit and forcing your highly trained pilots to unwillingly eject from their hundred million dollar aircraft.
There is literally no reason to have the ejection system wired to anything else, except the flight data recorder.
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It might be worthwhile to have the ejection system wired to a vital signs monitor and/or G-force detector, or for that to be part of the ejection subsystem. If it decided that you're likely unconscious, it could issue an alarm. If you don't cancel the alarm, it ejects you.
"Mishap's" (Score:2)
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I don't wish to be mean, but it's the military.
A few people dying in a training exercise is a mishap, when hundreds of them are sent to die in ordinary combat operations.
Also, it's a voluntary military. And these were crew on a jet fighter. They knew what they signed up for.
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Re:"Mishap's" (Score:4, Insightful)
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Probably mostly true these days, especially in peacetime. Most of the people who sign up are in their late teens or early twenties, and our society is such that most people that age don't have a great deal of experience with death and mortality. (This is on the whole a good thing, but that doesn't entirely eliminate all of its downsides.)
We're talking about fighter jet crew here, not infantry or whatnot, so some of them may have been fairly intelligent and possibly eve
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No, not really. Most civilians have very many prejudices about what makes up a soldier, sailor, Marine, or Air Force me
Re:"Mishap's" (Score:4, Informative)
The U.S. Navy classifies the crash which killed the pilot, navigator, and all of the crew save one, as a 'Mishap'....
The official U.S. Navy definition of a Mishap: "DoD and DoN define a mishap as, “An unplanned event or series of events that results in damage to DoD property; occupational illness to DoD personnel; injury to on- or off-duty DoD military personnel; injury to on-duty DoD civilian personnel; or damage to public or private property, or injury or illness to non-DoD ..."
There are different classifications of mishap. Class A Mishap is defined as, "Direct mishap cost totaling $2,500,000 or more. - A fatality or permanent total disability. - Destruction of a Department of Defense aircraft." So loss of an F-35 aircraft with or without pilot fatality or serious injury would be a class A mishap. A cook on a Navy Destroyer who receives severe burns in a kitchen accident that leads to permanent total disability, could also be classified as a class A mishap, even though there is no destruction of government property or actual damage to the kitchen or the ship itself. There are other classifications of mishaps of lesser severity, i.e. Class B, Class C, etc., they're all based on cost of property damage or level of injury or hospitalization.
I served in the Marine Corps for many years. Every word / legal term, including the term "Mishap", has an exact definition. So characterizing this loss of an F-35 and missing aircraft as a mishap is 100% correct.
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The U.S. Navy classifies the crash which killed the pilot, navigator, and all of the crew save one, as a 'Mishap'. It is just the way it is. Oh, my dad was one of the crew that didn't make it home that day.
And NASA calls them "incidents". Every bureaucracy has its terminology. FYI, NASA handle aircrafts "incidents" too, it's not purely about space. See first 'A' in acronym.
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Details (Score:1)
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That very much depends on where it went down.
The area mentioned in the article, is a relatively developed area, with a fair smattering of homes and businesses and whatnot scattered around. It's entirely possible that some random person accidentally got cellphone footage of the thing going down, in the background of their homemade bass fishing video or whatever.
No $25 air tag in it? (Score:4, Funny)
$160 million, and they couldn't spring the $25 to throw an air tag in it?
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$160 million, and they couldn't spring the $25 to throw an air tag in it?
Wouldn't the AirTag require a nearby iPhone for location. I suppose of the pilot didn't grab their iPhone before ejecting, we'd have a chance....
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> Wouldn't the AirTag require a nearby iPhone for location.
Yes. The plane is likely in a very remote location or bottom of the ocean. Both places are not likely to have working iPhones in the vicinity.
> I suppose of the pilot didn't grab their iPhone before ejecting, we'd have a chance....
If the pilot had an iPhone, it bailed out with the pilot.
Re: No $25 air tag in it? (Score:2)
Solution is to have a separate iPhone in F-35. It would be a very cost-effective add-on for mishaps like this. I estimate it would cost about only 45,000 dollars as a special military purchase.
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If the pilot had an iPhone, it bailed out with the pilot.
Unless they left it in the cup holder.
Emergency SOS via satellite (Score:2)
The plane is likely in a very remote location or bottom of the ocean. Both places are not likely to have working iPhones in the vicinity.
The more recently designed iPhones have satellite connectivity for exactly such locations. "Emergency SOS via satellite"
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> The more recently designed iPhones have satellite connectivity for exactly such locations. "Emergency SOS via satellite"
If the pilot had the iPhone, and took it out of their pocket and put it in the "cup holder", and then ejected, and if the phone stayed put in the cockpit while the aircraft flew on autopilot with the canopy missing, then yes, you'd have a chance. You could potentially see cell tower pings as the aircraft got lower to the ground. But there are a lot of ifs here and they all look pret
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"Connect to a satellite with your iPhone With iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 15, or iPhone 15 Pro, you can connect your iPhone to a satellite to text emergency services, request roadside assistance, and share your location with friends and family — all while you're off the grid with no
Luggage in an emergency evacuation. (Score:2)
>> I suppose of the pilot didn't grab their iPhone before ejecting, we'd have a chance....
Never ever take your luggage in an emergency evacuation.
Probably crashed in (Score:3)
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You really think it made it all the way down to Florida?
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Seriously, jokes about AirTags aside, this is supposed to be about the most connected combat aircraft ever. The pilot might be gone, but surely that should start the telemetry phoning home right until the impact so that special forces can go in and destroy the wreckage should one ever go down in a hostile combat zone? Also, there was supposedly a second F35 in the air that safely r
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A swampy jungle area full of gaters and snakes and various other wicked wildlife
No problem. Rangers usually picnic around there. :-)
It really should be very visible on radar (Score:5, Informative)
In most circumstances, an F35 actually has a massive radar cross-section, and is easy to track on radar. That is, when not flying combat or contested-airspace operations, or training operations that simulate those, it wears Luneberg reflectors [theaviationist.com], which hugely increase its radar return.
That obscures its actual radar signature from adversaries - F35s have been flying around in the Arabian Gulf with reflectors on, and the Iranians are so proud of themselves that they can track it.(TASS) [tass.com]
Also, in routine operations in friendly airspace, the reflectors paint a nice big fat dot on ATC radars (and the radars on aircraft) which provides another layer of proximity-mishap-avoidance (over and above the existing TCAS)
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reminds me of an old joke (Score:2)
In recent news the local army base is still hunting for one of its trucks, last seen just before receiving a fresh coat of camouflage paint.
idiots be idiots (Score:2)
So, they are telling the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and North Koreans that the US is so pitiful it can't even find something on its own territory where it knows more or less where it is.
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> pitiful it can't even find something on its own territory where it knows more or less where it is.
Yes.
Eastern powers build their military reputations mostly on posturing, braggadocio, and narrative shaping. Western powers build their military reputations mostly on results.
The 1967 Six Day War in the middle east provides a good example. At the time, although CIA analysts predicted otherwise, most of the world
Top-Secret Smoke (Score:2)
Can't find the F35? Look for the plume of top-secret smoke rising in the distance. There should be a sizable trail of taxpayer dollars leading right up to it.
boondoggle (Score:1)
The F-35 is one of the worst boondoggles in Pentagon history. Those morons figured they would commission a plane that could do everything - vtol and supersonic and stealth and bomber and fighter. The only thing they left out is the ability to operate underwater, probably just a clerical oversight. Meanwhile, Russia is killing Ukraine, and vice verse, with $500 drones.
I'll look around. (Score:2)
Honeypot? (Score:2)
Checking capabilities of Russian/Chinese satellites?
There, fixed that for you... (Score:1)
AI controlled (Score:1)
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Oh wait, was I really supposed to eject the pilot as dead weight??
Not as dead weight but to enhance survivability. Keeping maneuvering forces down to levels compatible with human life complicates survivability of the aircraft.
I'm sure the Chinese and Russians are helping..... (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)ll bet that the PRC pays better (Score:2)
Just list it on ebay if you find it. Let the bidding process play out, donâ(TM)t just sell it to the first country that comes calling.
CHINESE FISHERMEN IN SOUTH CAROLINE LAKES (Score:1)
I hope those people searching for the $140M* F35-B stay out of the way of all those Chinese "Fishermen" in the lakes of South Carolina. Also don't interfere with their deep-water sonar imaging fishfinders.
List price of F35-A (not this aircraft): $80M
List price of F35-B (yes, this one) $110M
Actual retail price as per DoD budget oversight: $140M
So when you hear Republicans yelping like hurt puppies that "Biden lost an $80M aircraft" remember that it was the USMC that had an in-air issue and the pilot ej
Ball (Score:2)
If only there was a surveillance balloon flying over South Carolina to provide more information.
Re:Beacon defeats the purpose.... (Score:4, Informative)
It shouldn't be operating in US airspace with transponder off. Sounds like it in this case, it was not deliberate.
The ADB transponder the public can use (Score:3)
The ADB transponder the public can use [flightradar24.com], to support websites such as www.flightradar24.com should be optional for military use. But this is military US aircraft, so why on earth can we not track our own aircraft, short of flying an AWACs to see over the horizon of the US Atlantic seaboard?
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The entire point of these planes is that they AREN'T visible to 70s tech like AWACs which pretty much any nation on earth has these days. The other problem is that the US is pretty darn empty and full of trees, ponds and other things that can hide things, even if you have it on radar or a recent transponder ping, if it was cruising at 500mph and then the pilot ejected, if it was still flightworthy and crashed over the next 10-15 minutes, you're talking an area of probably over 100 miles to look for a blip,
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Just look at all the stuff that showed up when the reservoirs were drying up not to mention all the missing people found in their vehicle decades later.
Re:Beacon defeats the purpose.... (Score:5, Informative)
Not only should it have a transponder on. It should also have the Luneburg lenses installed to massively increase RCS.
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Article I read indicated that the transponder wasn't working for unknown reasons. Sounds to me like something catastrophic happened that took out major portions of the electronics, which would certainly explain why an ejections was necessary.
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What? A Windows update?
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It looks like you're trying to eject. Do you want me to help you with that?
Re:The pork jet (Score:4, Informative)
Cost per plane since Lot 13 is down to around $80m for the Air Force version which is close to if not cheaper than an F15-EXII and much less than a Typhoon or a Rafale.
There's a reason just about every country that is allowed to purchase them wants them.
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Correct, number I can find is $101.3M for the "B" VTOL variant
Re:The pork jet (Score:5, Informative)
Amazing what bribes can achieve (Score:3, Insightful)
'that's been selected by several different air forces around the world'
the only question is how big the bribes were, and whether the people who gave them or received them will ever be caught. Which doesn't prove it's not a good aircraft, but the idea that these decisions are made for purely objective reasons is naïve.
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What group is paying you to post this nonsense? Do government contracts contain a lot of pork? Sure. But this is a capable 5th generation fighter that's been selected by several different air forces around the world which were generally comparing them to other good proven alternative aircraft. At $89m per plane, the price is comparable to upgraded 4th gen aircraft, and significantly lower than $150m price tag of the F-22, and by all accounts the F-35 is stealthier and has far better sensor integration. As far as drones, the communications infrastructure, sensor fusion, and advanced stealth materials are all directly applicable to the 6th gen NGAD program.
Suppose your income came from owning a business that manufactured a product, and your #1 customer is openly known to buy everything on its self-issued credit card where it has the power to raise the credit limit it gives itself simply by voting to do so -- which it always has done.
How much would you charge the customer for your product?
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That's just BS. The DoD's budget is set by congress
Yes, which is exactly what I said:
"...buy everything on its self-issued credit card where it has the power to raise the credit limit it gives itself simply by voting to do so -- which it always has done."