Considered one of the U.S. Marine Corps’ advanced F-35B Lightning stealth jump jets has gone missing after its pilot locked it onto autopilot mode and made an emergency ejection while flying over South Carolina on the afternoon of Sunday, September 17. Fortunately, the pilot survived and has been hospitalized in stable condition.
However the status and site of his F-35 stays a mystery—such a mystery that the Pentagon is soliciting suggestions from civilians to locate it!
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The F-35B in query was based at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, home to Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501, and was flying alongside one other F-35B, which returned safely to base. By now the, ‘zombie’ F-35B is definite to have crashed, because it could remain airborne for less than a pair hours cruising on internal fuel. But it surely can have flown a substantial distance—even a whole lot of miles—before striking the bottom.
There was some public indignation on the actual fact the Pentagon was unable to keep up track of the pilotless F-35.
Reportedly, the jet’s transponder—which might have been used to geolocate the aircraft—was not functioning for “some reason that we haven’t yet determined,” according to a base spokesman. Perhaps the identical inflight ‘mishap’ also suppressed the aircraft’s communication systems.
After all, as a stealth aircraft, the F-35’s position would inherently be difficult to trace non-cooperatively by radar. For each operational safety and security reasons, F-35Bs often fly non-combat missions with ‘Lunenberg Lens’ reflectors designed to increase their visibility to radar, but not it seems on this flight.
And if its fuel was exhausted and it crashed in an unpopulated area, the stealth fighter may not have produced much flame and smoke, allowing the crash site to be easily spotted from afar.
Thus, a joint search effort involving the Marine Corps, Air Force, and South Carolina police is underway, currently focused on the Lake Moultrie area 50 miles north of Charleston, in addition to Lake Marion, which is northwest adjoining to Moultrie. That implies the armed service don’t think the F-35 flew all that far-off. The Pentagon has stated they do not know whether the jet crashed on land or water.
This the fourth total hull loss (or “write off”) of an F-35B. MCAS Beaufort was also the positioning of the first-ever F-35 loss in September 28, 2018 in a mishap attributed to a faulty fuel tube. Subsequently, one other F-35B crashed after colliding with a KC-130 refueling tanker in September 2020, and the Royal Air Force lost a 3rd F-35B over the Mediterranean Sea in November 2021 from a malfunction brought on by an engine plug unintentionally left within the intake.
One other F-35B being test-flown prior to delivery to the military experienced an engine malfunction while landing at Fort Price, Texas, compelling the pilot to perform a zero-altitude ejection. The offender was vibrations build up a harmonic resonance causing disjunction of a fuel tube. Though heavily damaged, this aircraft appears recoverable, but when not, it will bring the entire variety of F-35B losses to 5.
The simpler and more quite a few F-35A conventional takeoff jet has suffered three hull loss accidents, while just one among the Navy’s catapult-launched F-35Cs was destroyed when it struck the ramp of the carrier USS Carl Vinson while attempting to land.
Just one pilot fatality—a disoriented Japanese Air Self Defense Force pilot—resulted from these eight hull-loss incidents on account of the successful use of ejection systems.
There have been additional accidents that damaged, but didn’t destroy, F-35s, with causes starting from a forced belly-landing, to exploding cannon shells and combusting engines.
What went fallacious?
The Pentagon has yet to point what went so fallacious with the jet to have compelled the pilot to eject while the airplane was still apparently able to cruising a major distance on autopilot.
One intriguing theoretical explanation might be a flaw with the jet’s On Board Oxygen Generating System (which feeds the pilot air from a jet engine’s compressor that has been ‘scrubbed’ clean of most nitrogen) and cabin pressurization, which could have endangered the pilot even when his jet remained flyable. In such a scenario, the chance of the pilot passing out or otherwise being incapacitated before he could land could be deemed to merit an emergency ejection, though in theory there must be an auxiliary bottle of air to attract from in case of OBOGS failure.
Difficulties with the F-35’s OBOGS have repeatedly come to the fore prior to now decade. In 2017, the Air Force Times reported five different incidents through which Air Force pilots flying F-35As based at Luke Airbase experienced OBOGS failures causing hypoxia or oxygen deprivation, necessitating use of a backup oxygen system.
OBOGS might be disrupted, for instance, as one among several effects from a failure of an F-35’s Integrated Power Pack (IPP), which also supplies electricity for cooling and cabin pressurization.
One pilot who experienced an IPP failure who managed to successfully land his aircraft described to The Aviationist the procedure to avoid succumbing to an OBOGS shutdown:
“…descend below 17,000 mean sea level, manually activate the backup oxygen system, bring the throttle to idle for five seconds, and actuate the flight control system/engine reset switch. These critical steps made sure I wasn’t exposed to any physiological effects from the cabin depressurizing or losing the OBOGS, and hopefully reset the IPP without further troubleshooting.”
He notes IPP failures are “…not common within the F-35, but they do occur every now and then, and we train continuously to emergency procedures in simulators to handle them appropriately.”
The F-35B is the costliest and shortest-ranged of the three variants of the F-35 Lightning, because it incorporates lift fans that allow it to lift off near vertically from the deck of an amphibious carrier or very small airfield. This design was made specifically on the request of the Marine Corps, and has also proven popular with foreign navies for pairing with smaller-sized aircraft carriers formerly only compatible with increasingly dated Harrier jump jets.
Nonetheless, vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft have at all times historically involved some sacrifices in performance (on account of the majority of the lift fans) and a better risk of accidents in comparison with more conventional designs. Single-engine jets broadly are also more more likely to be lost to engine failures than costlier-to-fly twin-engine jets.
More broadly, the F-35 program has long attracted controversy for huge development cost overruns, lengthy delays related to de-bugging its many novel systems, and high operating costs per flight hour. Nonetheless, hundreds of those jets are on order each on the export market and U.S. military, and the kind is benefiting from favorable economies of scale evident when the F-35A’s ‘fly-away’ price roughly matches or falls below non-stealth 4.5-generation jets.
That said, should the investigation implicate systemic flaws within the crash, it could construct support in Congress or the Pentagon for reduced procurement rates and/or total orders of F-35 aircraft in favor of investing in successor platforms.
While it could be tempting to assume the recent accident reflects systemic flaws within the F-35, such a conclusion won’t be warranted until we learn more concerning the specific causes that compelled the pilot to eject. The offender may indeed be a long-known flaw, or it could arise from a freak incident unlikely to breed itself, or aspects comparable to maintenance errors that aren’t intrinsic to the design. Such aspects still routinely cause annual attrition of respected and mature prior-generation aircraft, too.