The book said that ejecting is the correct action when the plane is “unresponsive to the pilot’s commands“. This simple, straight forward statement turns out to be more ambiguous than they intended. Do you eject if the radio doesn’t change channel? No, that would be silly, even though the plane didn’t respond to your command to change the channel. The plane is still flyable without the radio! Common sense says that you should just land and get the radio fixed. There’s even a whole procedure that pilots have to memorize about how to land at an airport safely even if you have no radio.

In this case the pilot changed from mode 4 (SVTOL for landing) to mode 1 (normal flight) when the ILS system went offline. But because the HUD blinked on and off several times, he didn’t realize that the plane was actually transitioning back to mode 1. He didn’t wait long enough for it to finish, and without his HUD he thought that the plane was unresponsive, so he ejected. But the plane was still flyable, even if it had actually been stuck in mode 4! You probably can’t dogfight in mode 4, but you can certainly fly to your alternate airport and land.

So instead of penalizing him for following his training to the letter, they changed the manual to state that ejecting is the correct course of action if the plane is unresponsive to the pilot’s “pitch, roll, or yaw commands” specifically.

At least one concept of it is that officers (and NCOs and maybe others) are expected to succeed when the 'book' is insufficient. Following the manual is not nearly enough.

Warfare is chaos; unexpected things happen; the manual is one input but people are expected to take initiative and overcome problems with or without it. It's not extra credit, it's a baseline expectation for the job. Also, this person is a colonel, not a second lieutenant.

He was, and was fired from his role as, commander of Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1 (VMX-1), which exists largely to validate and update “the book” for the rest of Corps.

So, if there is any position where simply “following the book” isn’t adequate to keep one’s job, it kind of makes sense that his was that position.

That's not correct. He decided that the aircraft was out of control because his primary displays went out at low altitude - the manual says eject if out of control below 6000 ft. But in fact the plane was still flying and responding to controls just fine.

A big factor in this seems to be his overall lack of experience in the F-35 and not flying enough hours to really stay proficient. Highly recommend this analysis by two former naval aviators: https://www.youtube.com/live/g8PBA7k6vP8?si=o2DDBX1XqmM_x1gR

That's not what the report is alleged to have said. This news story alleges that he executed proper emergency procedures, but for the WRONG emergency. It alleges he ejected per the procedure for out-of-control flight when what he actually (allegedly) had was partial electrical failure with operable standby instruments. Which is not a situation mandating immediate ejection.

> And the pilot should've figured that out?

Yes, probably. I suspect you're lacking context on the sophistication and comprehensiveness of their training.

Fighter pilots are extremely highly trained individuals. While data is scarce for the exact dollar cost - an F-22 pilot costs roughly 11 Million USD to train, pilots are expected to use judgement and be capable of dealing with high pressure/ambiguous outcomes.

as harsh as it sounds, the point is that as the commander: "the buck stops here"

yes, he didn't do anything by the book, but the command still suffered a great deal of embarrassment and loss. there's nothing dishonorable but it's normal to rotate him out of leadership.

I don't think it says exactly that. It says he still had backup instruments and good flight controls and ejected from a flyable plane. If that were strictly true, they'd be well within standards to fire him.

I'm not sure I agree though -- it was a shitty situation all around, missed approach, go around, instrument only conditions, lightning strike that took out the HMD and most of the cockpit displays. That's a real shitshow in a completely fly by wire plane.

The pilot should have figured it out especially since all the controls were working. It’s like he ejected from a $100 million aircraft because one of the screens went out.

FTA: VMX-1 is in charge of assessing the Corps’ aircraft and helping develop and refine tactics, techniques and procedures to fly them in combat successfully.

He was the commander of VMX-1. They effectively write the book.

"And the pilot should've figured that out?"

Yes. That's the job.

> Del Pizzo’s F-35B malfunctioned and its primary displays and communications cut out as Del Pizzo was attempting to land through rain at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina. However, the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”

> The report said Del Pizzo followed the F-35B manual’s recommendations for ejecting from an out-of-control jet but also criticized the manual’s definition of out-of-control as too broad.

It sounds like the displays blacked out, but radios and flight controls still worked. This is still definitely an aircraft that can land safely.

The technical reason was “for loss of trust and confidence in his ability to execute the responsibilities of his command” which is not related to him following the book or if the book is right or wrong.

Which makes sense. It was subjective and that is ok.

“As a commander you serve at the pleasure of the commandant,” Del Pizzo said. “It was an absolute privilege to have the opportunity to lead the Marines, sailors and civilians of VMX-1.”

also

“he made the decision to relieve the commanding officer of [VMX-1], due to the unique mission of VMX-1.”

The fact that the plane was able to fly over 60 miles after he ejected kinda proves that ejecting wasn't really needed.

I read the whole article and from what is described, VMX-1 is where the best pilots of the USMC evaluate aircraft. Which I take it they are test pilots and are expected to perform much better than "standard" pilots are required to.

I guess the USMC expected him to try until the very last moment to recover the aircraft.

>>Feels like they just need someone to blame for losing the plane.

Its always hard to be a the last man in the hierarchy of a big budget project run by idiots.

They always need somebody to fire to 'cya'.

This seems to be less about fault and more about perception

Many, many airplanes and lives were saved by pilots not following the book.

See "Aviation Disasters" on TV.

Yeah, PR and politics was going sideways in light of having all those crashes stacking up on their record. Someone needed a write-off.

This is why books like Catch-22 were written.

That quote was Russian observations on their securing valuable technical information, but lamenting on their inability to overcome their capability gap through spying due to changes in tactics of their "main adversary". In WW2, a major factor for the US Naval success in the Pacific was a change in attack doctrine. Aircraft would attack relentlessly from multiple directions, overwhelming the Japanese defenses. In the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, when Australian and US pilots mauled a Japanese supply convoy with Bristol Beaufighter aircraft. In the battle, aircraft fake a torpedo run, the ships changed course to align with the aircraft and minimize the attack surface, then they were strafed with the four 20 mm cannons. The air campaign in the Pacific was much more vicious and effective than Europe. One of the pilots quoted

"They went in and hit this troop ship. What I saw looked like little sticks, maybe a foot long or something like that, or splinters flying up off the deck of ship; they'd fly all around ... and twist crazily in the air and fall out in the water. Then I realized what I was watching were human beings. I was watching hundreds of those Japanese just blown off the deck by those machine guns. They just splintered around the air like sticks in a whirlwind and they'd fall in the water."

The Russians have difficulty adapting their tactics on the field. Reviewing the successes of the US battles must be quite different than throwing bodies at a front line.

These sort of quotes are cute but not really usefull. Probably counterproductive.

There is 0 people in the US Navy that did service in the 2WW. There has been multiple generations. There is no way there is that much of institutional inertia, if the quote was correct at the time.

Punnishing failure disincentives a lot of things. It has drawbacks.

US pilots havent really been engaged in a war against a peer since ww2. It might be true. But we probably shouldnt extrapolate from bombing terrorists in the desert to actually fighting against say China.

But the review found that the pilot did do the right thing and did follow the manual. The definition of, "out of control" seems to be to blame. He's even been cleared to fly again.

Those quotes we're almost certainly made up jokes and not assessments of the US military. The first appears to come from an Internet image attributing it to "A Russian Document". The second has no known source and has been variously referred to both the US Navy and Air Force.

> The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime

Is not fighting a near peer since WWII 80 years ago, really hate using rubbish to prove a point

He did the right thing. He's alive and well, fired from his command instead of deceased like the other servicemen in the OV-22 and FA-18D.

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> The crash is Marine's third in several weeks

Should be “the Marines’ third.” I don’t mean to be a stickler, but for a moment I thought this one pilot was crashing a plane a week!

And as a bit of context it's mentionned at the end that:

>It was the Marines’ third aviation crash in six weeks, following the August crash of an F/A-18D Hornet in southern California, which killed its pilot, and an MV-22 Osprey crash in Australia that killed three Marines.

> But how can the pilot figure that out, while flying the aircraft?

The standby instruments were working and falling back to them in the event of a primary flight display failure is part of the training

> One needs to evaluate decisions based on the information available at the time the decision was made.

Sure. He was at 1900 feet and in a climb when he ejected. I can understand it’s nerve wrecking to trust your backup instruments in this situation, but it’s not like ejecting is a completely safe zero risk option either. That jet could have come down anywhere.

If a ship's captain is asleep, as he logically must be some of the time, and the officers on watch crash the ship into a reef, that captain's career is over even though by normal civilian standards it might be surmised that he did nothing wrong. Even if he's got the receipts to prove he trained his men properly according to the book and they passed all their tests. Civilian intuition about blame doesn't really apply.

> But how can the pilot figure that out, while flying the aircraft?

Looking out the window.

Planes were cheaper then. I wonder if the higher costs of today's planes results in any pressure to try to save planes that in your dad's day would have been considered not worth the risk?

An F-86 ranged from $180-$580k in 1950 dollars, depending on the model. That's around $2.4-7.8 million now. That's quite a bit lower than the statistical value of human life that is currently used by the government for regulatory analysis, which is $13.1 million.

An F-35 is something like $80-$110 million. Even if we add the cost of training for the pilot, which Google tells me is $10.1 million for an F-35, to the statistical life value we only get $23.2 million which is only 21-29% of the cost of the plane.

The procedure was to:

1. know the optimal glide speed. Since the jet was traveling much faster than that, he pulled up the nose to trade excess speed for altitude.

2. trim the airplane for optimal gliding

3. push the nose down to maintain optimal glide speed

4. work the math on altitude, air pressure and sink rate to get distance traveled

This was long before calculators (1950s) so he had to know the formulae and the figures. I read one of his certification tests for flying jets, and you had to know an awful lot.

When I was at Boeing I was told that one of the engineering marvels on a jet was the mechanical computer that managed the engine, reducing it to a single lever for the pilot.

P.S. ejection seats were new in those days, with bugs that could injure or kill the pilot. He figured it was safer to glide the bird in.

When I did my flight training on a CAPS-enabled airplane, they showed us footage and stats from the military to say that there was a clear bias towards "saving" planes, especially in training, and that it led to more fatalities than if folks stuck by the book. Thought it was super interesting, and definitely helped to cement the attitude of using the resources of the plane by the book, which, (I think sadly), this guy is being punished for.

Is this just the consequences of rapidly ballooning costs of modern fighter jets? At a tenth of a billion dollars each, there's not much room in the budget for what are even understandable aircraft losses. If I'm not mistaken nothing else is nearly as expensive except the B2. In some ways, losing one of these things is getting pretty close to losing a naval vessel.

Acknowledging this to be the case might help people to understand why they're demanding perfection even if it's risky for the pilots.

It's not that he could have reasoned his way to not ejecting, it's that the standby instruments were still functioning, and are there for just this moment. He could have continued without ejecting based on that alone.

Reading between the lines, he flinched, and while that was in line with the manual, the manual wasn't good enough, and as someone below said: the position from which he was dismissed was one where they evaluate, criticize and extend the manual. Ejecting too soon wasn't a failure of due diligence, but it disqualified him from a position where "in line with the manual" isn't good enough.

Something I think about in stories is "how strong is the emotional hook."

This one is great! A guy fighting his controls, weighing the risk to his life, a Top Gun-style commander of a squadron, ejecting (well, an hour) before the plane explodes.

It scores low on the "relevance" scorecard, but it's off the charts in terms of human interest, and I think it's climbing due to the latter.

It’s possible. But note that there has been a lot of criticism of the F–35 since the inception of the program because it’s a multi–role fighter–bomber jack–of–all–trades that tries to satisfy everybody. Partly this is a political problem. Combat airplanes are expensive to design and need political approval. So you have to get every branch of the military to sign on to the project simultaneously, otherwise you’ll never even start. Therefore the thing has to be a ground–attack bomber for the Army, because they want to replace the Warthog. And it needs to be a VTOL for the Navy, so that they don’t have to build a supercarrier for it. And the Marines need X, the Coast Guard wants Y, the Girl Scouts really rely on Z, and on and on and on. And of course it goes without saying that you had better be able to mount any and every weapon system ever designed to the thing.

And it has to be Stealth.

Hating the F-35 in general has been a thing for the Anti-American crowd, mainly driven by western peaceniks who don't see a point in military might (largely depleted now) and the pro-Russia/China/etc crowd who need it to be shit so their fighters can seem competent. As is usual the latter "inform" the former.

One could imagine an unpiloted F-35 flying 65 miles in a random direction before crashing itself is probably more of a safety issue than an issue of idiology

The plane could have crashed into a populated center, taken out a neighborhood, etc. I imagine the pilot's priority is to stay with the aircraft and not bail at the first sign of trouble or until they can no longer control it and are sure it will crash in an unpopulated area.

It has a political component because of the cost. The military must be accountable to the taxpayers when they incur losses. We don't have tolerance for unlimited crashes and the reasons or blame must be assigned.

That's a separate argument on specifically who should be blamed here or whether blame was properly assigned. But we can't just crash our most expensive jet and throw our hands up saying "whelp, that sucks".

This was a major story that people have been wondering what the explanation was. The most advanced fighter jet going “missing” over America, pilot landing in someone’s backyard, taking hours to find crash site, learning it was flying on autopilot before crashing etc.

Any story with an explanation would draw attention

Anything that makes the US look bad is sticky around here.

Comparing going down with the ship to dying for a cause seems like a false equivalence. When a ship sinks, the outcome is more or less the same whether people are onboard or not: in either case the ship will sink. The only difference is whether or not the passengers / crew survive.

Fighting for a cause, on the other hand, generally requires that people sacrifice themselves. If no one is willing to die, then the fight is very unlikely to be successful. Being willing to die (and sometimes dying) has the ability meaningful change the outcome.

dying in the line of duty is still weirdly seen as good leadership

The captain being the last person off a sinking ship is a naval version of "lead from the front". The captain going down with the ship is a probable consequence of following that ideal.

Being a stealth jet doesn’t mean you can’t accommodate this problem when training. The F-35 already has radar reflectors which increase radar signature to obscure stealth properties during peace time, having a beacon on top of that isn’t that absurd.

It has an SSR transponder, but the electrical problem took that out along with most of the other avionics.

> The investigation report said the F-35′s transponder failed as a result of the electrical malfunction

Reading the article before posting comments could help.

Then it must also not have any secure communications, and is thus a fucking joke.

I mean, stealth is all very well when nobody's ejected. But shouldn't an ejection trigger some sort of beacon? We probably want to find the pilot, after all.

You'd think the military's budget could stretch to a $300 Garmin InReach.

When articles like this are posted, I'm always surprised to learn the majority of HN commenters are pilots.

I can understand this reaction normally but VMX-1 appears to be some sort of test division? I imagine it’s fair to say this guy isn’t test pilot stuff if he panics and ejects the second the book says he can.

It’s not like he stopped being a pilot if I understand it right.

That’s exactly how I read this: did the Marine general staff think, on review, that this guy had “the right stuff” to lead their test pilot division? Nope.

The plane situation sounds shitty in the extreme, and an F-35’s electronics fritzing sounds, um, real bad, and sadly, not shocking, but the Marines’ elan and doctrine at its core involves dealing with stuff like this successfully, in the field, with little support. I imagine that the people around him felt fairly similarly, and so, end of story. He won’t be moved up to general staff, he’ll get some fine deployments until he decides to head out, which given his age, he’s opted out of a couple times, it’s fine, and he’ll be fine. Just, unfortunately, like you say, he wasn’t Chuck Yeager when it came down to it.

(also seems weird that a $100M airplane can't figure out how to land itself if the pilot ejects ...)

You landed a nice pun.

Not sure you want the stealthy $80 million dollar plane packed full of restricted electronics and bombs to land at an insecure airport full of civilians.

Also: in air refueling and carriers mean the plane may not be anywhere near a safe airport.

Bullshit. If you lose the engine at low altitude on climb out, there is no hope of banking much less returning. At that point, it's all about looking for a straight road or level field without power lines +- 30 to 45 degrees of runway heading. For other light aircraft that get themselves into unrecoverable situations like deep stalls where there is sufficient energy, Cirrus SR series have parachutes (CAPS) that reduce the horizontal vector to almost 0 and the vertical component to about 17 mph / 25 ft/s / 7.6 m/s. CAPS isn't deployable < 500' AGL, so if the terrain is unforgiving on a failure on takeoff, there's no safe recovery option except a rough "landing".

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You shouldn't be flying an F-35B if you can't fly it without the HUD (assuming functional flight controls).

A 110 million dollar fighter jet is worth an order of magnitude more than a human life, yes. And that doesn't even mention the potential for civilian casualties from the plane crashing.

The USAF has done, and continues to do CAS as an important mission.

Edit: I will clarify. USAF multirole fighters (And the A-10) train to, and execute CAS in combat regularly. Even bombers do from time-to-time.

Surely, other opinions can have relevance. Do you think an aerospace engineer can have no opinion? What about an avionics tech that works on display and comms systems? What about an aviation safety officer or a commercial pilot? These are all people with relevant perspectives.

Even if there was the military has a way of making these sorts of head scratching authority decisions all the time. There’s plenty of appeal to the rulebooks and process but it’s ultimately a human choice, very political, very high levels of (sometimes arbitrary) standards.

He was at 1900 feet and could not be sure in which direction the plane was going.

If the plane would fly towards the ground with mach 1 it would have hit it in 1.5 seconds.

The problem here is that when you make the call to get out, you don't know that.

There's no shortage of "planes that can no longer maintain flight" according to all sorts of standards continuing to do so - a few that come to mind were a B-36 that had several engines fail and several others unable to make full rated power, was unable to hold altitude, and so the crew bailed out. The plane somehow managed another 200 miles before crashing.

There was that F-15 that lost a wing from a midair collision, and the pilot landed safely - because neither the pilot nor the instructor could tell exactly what was missing, and the escaping fuel vapor hid the extent of the damage from other planes in the flight. After landing with one wing, even the manufacturer didn't believe that the plane could fly in that condition.

You have to make what is, often, a split second decision based on incomplete information, and after the Air Force lost a wave of pilots trying to save aircraft that could not be saved, the training switched around to "When in doubt, eject."

Anyway, it's pretty easy to quarterback it from after the fact, but a highly trained pilot decided, based on everything he knew, that the plane couldn't be saved, ejected, and survived. Yes, there are consequences to that action, but if he stayed with it and was wrong, there would be far more terminal consequences.

Not in hindsight, no.

What sucks for the pilot is he followed procedure and at the time had no way of knowing whether the craft would remain stable or totally brick and spiral any second (rendering a procedural ejection even more dangerous).

Flat spins can get resolved by the CG adjustment from ejection: the famous cornfield bomber.

Yes, as the old saying goes “better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.”

The decision to relieve him was made with the benefit of having much more data and time to make a decision available to them than the pilot had.

There was exactly 1 (one) fatality involving F-35s. In Japan air force, attributed to the piloting error.

This Number Of Fatalities On Any Other Platform Not Being The F-35 Will Shock You [link] !!!

For those downvoting you, the "justifiable lack of faith" here, above and beyond what was enumerated in the article, is that at the time this happened there had been two fatal F35 malfunctions/crashes in the preceding six weeks. I don't blame the pilot for not wanting to become another statistic.

64 miles the school bus sized rocket flew before crashing into some suburb.

Imagine if someone accidentally fired a tomahawk missile in South Carolina for some reason by procedure.

The operator had 10 minutes to cancel but instead acted prematurely.

I would hope that there's more to it than money. Loss of a plane can have a wider impact, but surely the gear is the expendable part. This isn't Warhammer 40k.