Good news for the Greenland that US are unable to fly airplanes properly in cold weather :-D

But why was there water in the hydraulic system in the first place?

Who eats the loss under such circumstances?

Government or Lockheed Martin or are these 200 million dollar jets insured ?

This is wild. You can't get away from these zoom calls even as an F-35 pilot.

> "they likely would have advised a planned full stop landing or a controlled ejection instead of a second touch-and-go"

Is that not what the pilot did anyway? Or is a "controlled ejection" different from what they did?

So as a pilot you can't override the software to stop it from "thinking that the plane is on the ground" mode?

Something similar happened recently with A320 when it didn't want to land on an airfield during emergency unless it was flown in a special mode. But F-35 doesn't have that?

The F35 has been a shit show for 15 years or more. So not only is it a disaster at the tactical and operational level, with the US holding the keys and being run by a cretin, it is now also a strategic blunder.

The French were right with their strategic autonomy, de Gaulle evidently prescient, and the various EU countries falling for the F35 would have been better off choosing the Rafale or Gripen.

Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.

On most meetings, I wish I was sitting in an ejection seat.

Switzerland, if they want something they can fly for air policing is forced to buy the F35 at what every price the US feels fit (even though the contract with Lockheed states a fixed price, naive politicians and consultants found out the hard way). Of course the CHF to USD conversion is fix at a shit rate from many years ago and from what I understand there is no way around that because the SNB did the conversion back then already.

We have no alternative we can get before 2035. They are talking about extending the F/A-18 but since we would be the only ones still using them we would have to pay for that too at who know what price.

The public approved 6 billion and now it looks like it will be way more, excluding skyrocketing maintenance which is not included and a patriot missile system that when it is finally delivered will cost who knows how many billions.

The whole thing is an absolute shit show here and that's ignoring the technical issues this thing has...

F-35 is a boondoggle.

$200M for one fighter plane is insane.

If the USA ever had to go to war with this weapon, a huge number of them would be offline at any given time, and every single airframe loss would cause a huge dent in overall combat power.

I don’t understand why our military and political leaders keep trying to buy ridiculously overpriced Swiss Army knife weapons (lots of flexibility but great at nothing) instead of mass producing combat knives (only good for one thing but great at it and lots of them).

Article reads like they are still blaming pilot, like what else he/she was supposed to do?!

> Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.

I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.

Not your average end user call for support...

The F-35 is unstable by design and requires constant adjustments by the computer system to fly. So it is actually impossible to "just" turn the computer off and fly manually.

These planes are huge pieces of shit. No country should be spending money buying these from the US / Lockheed Martin.

Is it just me or the title made it seemed like the conference call was the cause of the crash?

Very different scenario, but flying my puddle jumper one of the first times after getting my license, once I took off from an airport in Connecticut and was about to cross a large body of water, my exhaust temperatures spiked really, really high, essentially indicating the engine was seconds from melting. But it didn't.

So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily with the equipment on board I managed a call to the flight school, who put me in touch with the mechanic. I circled above an airport as he pulled up the maintenance logs, we discussed what I was seeing, he noted that there had been a report of a sensor issue that had been squawked, so we concluded I should feel safe to fly straight home.

At the time it felt insanely cool to be able to be doing that WHILE flying the plane. While an unfortunate outcome for this particular pilot, as an elite pilot, part of me thinks when this cropped up part of him was like: "ahh right, this is why I'm top dog"

If a third of the hydraulic fluid was water, it was like that meme video of the woman who added washer fluid to the car’s oil - no way was that going to work properly.