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F-35 premature ejection? No pun intended.
- Thread starter weaponoffreedom
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Crash site was in Williamsburg County, SC. They were very fortunate as you could not pick a more sparsely populated county in the area. Maybe took out a couple of deer when it crashed.
It's too early to tell. I learned yesterday that the airplane has an "auto eject" during certain flight regimes.
Sounds crazy, but when the lift fan is engaged - roughly 35,000 HP is being run through a 6" drive shaft and a small gearbox.
If that thing fails, the airplane will pitch down rapidly - a pilot may not have time to recognize and eject in the event of that failure - so the "auto-eject" makes sense when flying in vertical mode.
It may be that the airplane initiated the ejection. It may be that the pilot ejected before they should have.
It's too hard to know, and too early to judge, from the information given.
But to your point - if the airplane kept flying for 60 miles after you got out, it sure looks like you got out too early.
Sounds crazy, but when the lift fan is engaged - roughly 35,000 HP is being run through a 6" drive shaft and a small gearbox.
If that thing fails, the airplane will pitch down rapidly - a pilot may not have time to recognize and eject in the event of that failure - so the "auto-eject" makes sense when flying in vertical mode.
It may be that the airplane initiated the ejection. It may be that the pilot ejected before they should have.
It's too hard to know, and too early to judge, from the information given.
But to your point - if the airplane kept flying for 60 miles after you got out, it sure looks like you got out too early.
what Astro just said is the latest... that explanation I read on the news was the same, because of the USMC version having the capabilities of the old Harrier, that auto elect feature and the auto stability controls, the auto eject feature is quite a good explanation.
I can only think it is quite reasonable the electronically artificial intelligence controlled the aircraft just chucked the pilot overboard and continued to fly itself until it crashed 60 miles away..
because it's accepting the idea that a 40 something year old USMC pilot ejected himself because he decided to find out what this button does when you push it. is troubling
..
I can only think it is quite reasonable the electronically artificial intelligence controlled the aircraft just chucked the pilot overboard and continued to fly itself until it crashed 60 miles away..
because it's accepting the idea that a 40 something year old USMC pilot ejected himself because he decided to find out what this button does when you push it. is troubling
..
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Wow. This takes ghost riding your 20” bicycle to a whole new level.
I wonder what safeties there are on the auto-eject; this could be disastrous if the plane was involved in combat, and the system decided to eject its pilot out, especially over enemy territory. Almost seems riskier than the possibility of losing a pilot who wasn’t able to eject in an actual emergency. Am I off base here?
You bring up the same concerns that I think many people are considering right now. This is a big program, and we sold a lot of the B models that have the system.
Lockheed Martin’s been building airplanes for a long time and they have a lot of former harrier guys on there, I have to believe that the parameters for auto eject were carefully considered, and tested.
But, I have no idea what the control system looks like, or how it measures parameters, if it’s integrated into the mission computers, and in all that, there is a chance of a “glitch”.
In my 35+ years in Aviation, there have been literally dozens of cases in which the engineers designed something as a “improvement”, promised great performance, but it had unexpected failure modes, which pilots discover.
This may be one of those cases.
4WD
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Seems like this will take several months to investigate …
(Internal forensics and OEM testing etc) …
The builder has many suppliers to work with as well …
(Internal forensics and OEM testing etc) …
The builder has many suppliers to work with as well …
I am confused - was it inverted when the pilot ejected?
Why on earth are they even flying over densely populated areas inverted?
Why on earth are they even flying over densely populated areas inverted?
This guy has great sound effects. 
Who said it was inverted?
sometimes they don't find a hole in the logic until that particular piece of machinery encounters that one unique situation no one ever encountered before and the engineers never tried to defeat.
Testing is ridiculously hard. For hardware and for software. There are so many theoretical states that a complete system can be in and it's impossible to test every state that it can be in. I've dealt with this in my work, where it's "what are the chances?" And often it's where a one in a quadrillion chance means that it might still happen in the real world since there may be millions of parts running for years and the hope is to make it "fault tolerant".
But the thing that many don't realize is that it can just one node/wire that determines whether or not an indicator light turns on or maybe that eject sequence starts. And that wire is maybe 5-20 nanometers wide depending on the semiconductor process. There's a phenomenon called "bit flip" where the state can be 0 or 1, but wire's state can flip for some random reason such as an electrostatic event or cosmic radiation. I remember talking to people who worked on space/military electronics, and they often use "radiation-hardened" processes that present less volume where they can absorb such radiation. Something like silicon on sapphire or silicon on insulator. Silicon dies need mechanical strength, and that's usually from just a certain thickness of silicon, but it can be silicon deposited on something else that can be stronger.
There was an interesting case where an error in election equipment was determined to likely be due to a bit flip, and one where it vastly changed the number.
What do Apple, the FBI and a Belgian politician have in common? In 2003, in Belgium there was an election using electronic voting machines. Mysteriously one candidate summed an excess of 4096 votes. An accurate analysis led to the official explanation that a spontaneous creation of a bit in position 13 of the memory of the computer attributed 4096 extra votes to one candidate. One of the most credited answers to this event is attributed to cosmic rays i.e.(gamma), which can filter through the atmosphere. There are cases though, with classical computers, like forensic investigations, or system recovery where such soft-errors may be helpful to gain root privileges and recover data.
It was reported by an eyewitness that it was inverted when it went over their house.
NBC news. Not that there any kind of bastion of truth to begin with
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...ng-inverted-crash-eyewitnesses-say-rcna105794
Had not heard that, thanks. Yeah, witnesses in aviation mishaps are horribly unreliable.…NBC news. Not that there any kind of bastion of truth to begin with
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...ng-inverted-crash-eyewitnesses-say-rcna105794
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Copy that, figured you would have good insight on the subject.
Would you say that the "older generation" aircraft such as the F14 or FA18 or F-16 or F-15 would have this same issue? Have you heard of this happening before? Either premature ejection by pilot or auto ejection by the aircraft?
4WD
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