UPDATE: Joint Base Charleston announced Monday evening that a debris field believed to be the missing F-35 was found two hours northeast of the bottom.
The Marine Corps is pausing its aviation operations for 2 days because the disappearance of a Marine Corps F-35B jet over South Carolina on Sunday stays unsolved.
The Corps’ Monday statement announcing the standdown cited three recent significant mishaps involving Marine aircraft.
“In the course of the safety stand down, aviation commanders will lead discussions with their Marines specializing in the basics of secure flight operations, ground safety, maintenance and flight procedures, and maintaining combat readiness,” the statement reads. “This stand down being taken to make sure the service is maintaining operational standardization of combat-ready aircraft with well-prepared pilots and crews.”
In August, a Marine pilot was killed after his F/A-18D Hornet crashed in southern California, and three Marines were killed in an MV-22 Osprey crash in Australia days later.
Within the wake of those mishaps, the acting commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, ordered every unit within the Marine Corps to review its safety practices, and he said the Corps will establish a security center led by a general officer by summer 2024.
The standdown comes along with these measures.
Where is the F-35?
Meanwhile, a Marine F-35B fighter jet remains to be missing after its pilot parachuted out on Sunday.
A pilot flying a Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501 aircraft safely ejected from an F-35B on Sunday, a 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing spokesperson said.
The pilot, whose name has not been released, landed in a North Charleston neighborhood at around 2 p.m. Sunday, The Associated Press reported. The pilot was transferred to a close-by medical center in stable condition, Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, said Sunday.
But just what happened to the jet stays unclear.
A day after the disappearance, the seek for the stealth aircraft stays underway, with teams employing each ground and air assets, in accordance with the bottom.
“Based on the jet’s last-known position and in coordination with the FAA, we’re focusing our attention north of JB Charleston, around Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion,” Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, said on X, formerly often called Twitter.
Amongst those involved within the investigation are Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina; 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing, based at Cherry Point, North Carolina; Navy Region Southeast; the Federal Aviation Administration; the Civil Air Patrol; and law enforcement across the state, in accordance with the joint base.
The joint base has asked the general public for assist in locating the aircraft, providing much more fodder for ribbing by those startled that an roughly $100 million fighter jet could someway vanish.
“How within the hell do you lose an F-35?” Rep. Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, whose district includes Lake Moultrie and a part of Lake Marion, tweeted Monday morning. “How is there not a tracking device and we’re asking the general public to what, discover a jet and switch it in?”
Mace said on X early that afternoon that she planned to fulfill with Marine Corps representatives to ask for answers on what happened to the jet.
She later tweeted, “One in all the shortest meetings I’ve ever had, bc guess what, nobody @usmc sent over to transient me and my staff had any answers. Shocker.”
“When there’s an ongoing situation which potentially threatens public safety, the Pentagon has an obligation to maintain residents and their representatives informed,” Mace said in an announcement to Marine Corps Times on Monday, calling the Marine Corps’ lack of answers “unacceptable.”
A 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing spokesperson said in an announcement to media Monday that the mishap was under investigation, adding, “We’re unable to supply additional details to preserve the integrity of the investigatory process.”
If the F-35 did go down in a lake, said retired Air Force Gen. Hawk Carlisle, the very first thing a search team would likely do could be to search for debris from the plane’s impact, or slicks from fuel, oil or hydraulic fluid floating on the surface to attempt to narrow down the search area.
“They might search for telltale signs that something catastrophic happened within the lake,” said Carlisle, who flew F-15s and was head of Air Combat Command until his 2017 retirement.
If the search team spots such signs, Carlisle said, the military likely would usher in sonar or other detection equipment to search for where the F-35 could be submerged.
Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina, and the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing declined to comment on the status of the fighter’s transponder, though The Washington Post reported that a base spokesman said the transponder was not working on the time of the crash for an unknown reason.
In an emailed statement Monday, the F-35 Joint Program Office didn’t address Defense News’ questions on whether transponders have had problems prior to now. The office said that the pilot’s health and well-being were paramount and that it was working with the Marine Corps, industry and other involved parties to assist with the investigation.
Carlisle said the bizarre circumstances of the mishap and the problem finding the fighter raises other questions, akin to whether the fighter was on a knowledge link with one other aircraft on the time. If the fighter was on a knowledge link transmitting and receiving information, Carlisle said, that might have provided more clues to assist track it down.
“Those are all things that an investigation or safety board goes to take a look at,” Carlisle said.
If the jet was on autopilot when its pilot ejected, Carlisle said, it conceivably could have flown for hours and a whole lot of miles more, depending on how much gas it had left. A totally fueled F-35B can fly slightly greater than 1,000 miles.
Carlisle also wondered if this jet’s radar cross section had been augmented to make the F-35 more visible to radar, which the military sometimes does when F-35s are flown stateside for air shows or local training missions.
The military sometimes augments the F-35′s cross-section during public or semi-public flights so they are going to look different on a radar from how it could during an actual combat mission, Carlisle said. That way, he said, an adversary akin to China wouldn’t have the ability to peek at a planned air show with an F-35 and determine what it could actually appear like at war.
If the lost F-35′s cross-section had not been augmented to mask its true radar signature and make it more visible, Carlisle said, that may explain why it has been so hard to seek out.
But even discussing ways the military might have the ability to seek out this missing F-35 may be fraught, Carlisle said.
“You’ve got to be slightly careful about what you speak about,” Carlisle said. “Because if you’ve got an airplane go down in combat, you don’t want the bad guys to know easy methods to find it.”
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
Irene Loewenson is a staff reporter for Marine Corps Times. She joined Military Times as an editorial fellow in August 2022. She is a graduate of Williams College, where she was the editor-in-chief of the scholar newspaper.