Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations because most other pilots would have interpreted the situation similarly, promoted, and then fired less than 4 months after moving with his family to the location of his new role. It remains unclear why but scapegoating to distract from the plane's issues is commonly seen as the most likely explanation, with all the risks it entails (pilots becoming more hesitant to eject or openly admit mistakes so safety can be improved).
Sure the pilot with his life on the line could have risked the investment into his education on top of the investment into the aircraft to figure out whether an ill-prepared procedure was really ill-prepared — but should that really be the expectation?
If you rely on your pilot having to interpret written procedure in a very specific way by mind magic, that is on those who wrote the procedure. I am not sure if "ignores the procedure of a aircraft that expensive" is the skill you are looking for, even if it safes the aircraft for the moment.
At least put all that extra nonsense at the end.
This story seems to completely discount any "lost confidence" as a made up story.
The "lost confidence" angle would be discarded if it was just made-up nonsense. It is also a convenient angle to pin the blame on a scapegoat who was proven to have zero blame or responsibility.
One can only imagine what would have been written on the guy if he crashed and went down with the plane. Certainly we would be reading about human errors and failures in judgement and lack of training and reckless behavior.
This is what mid/upper management types do in large organizations to cover their ass.
I recall a story about a high-speed train accident in Spain where the conductor was found to be the sole responsible due to speeding, and it took an investigator from the European Union to call out the company's managers for unexplainably failing to implement and run a pretty standard traffic control system on that track section whose basic features include automatically enforcing speed limits. The system would render impossible that sort of failure and, in spite of having been installed, it was unexplainably disconnected. But it was human error, of course.
Simplest reason: that commandant had a vendetta against him
Only because people aren't willing to accept the fact that this is just rank, base, bog standard, internal military politics. The pilot was probably fine until he got a new, important posting that displaced someone else and that someone else was willing to throw some elbows to get it overturned.
As for fault, the reality of the military command chain is that you are responsible for shit that goes wrong on your watch even if it isn't necessarily your fault. You can lose the ability to get important postings if something bad goes wrong even once. Generally, those people run their time out as quietly as possible and leave. It is not smart of the military, but the military isn't noted for smart.
There was very little about a devils advocate side to the story.
I could imagine others joking about ejecting for minor warnings or trolling him. Especially in the marines.
Do a FOIA on all ejections because his is just one. He had a good 27 year career and ended as a colonel with retirement benefits.
"In fact, the F-35B’s flight manual said, “the aircraft is considered to be in out of controlled flight (OCF) when it fails to respond properly to pilot inputs,” adding, “if out of control below 6,000 feet AGL (above ground level): EJECT.”"
Feels like we're missing a piece of the puzzle in this story. Maybe something else happened over that year? Politics? The story starts as you'd expect. Accidents happen. Support. Returning to duty. What went wrong?
So they fire the guy, and promote someone else that can be relied on to say that the F-35 has no more defects than any other plane had at this point in the program, and we can trust the US military industrial complex to deliver the F-47 in a similar fashion.
At the same time, you send a message: eject when your plane is misbehaving and you'll end your career. Sure, there's a risk that someone won't eject when they should, but there's also a chance that you'll be able to cover up another malfunction when the pilot nurses the plane back to base.
Did Pizzo say anything disparaging about the F-35? I doubt it. But when you've got billions of dollars of revenue/potential embarrassment on the line, you don't take chances.
Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
The software mess from F-35 would it be even worse without the standard, or has the existence of the standard hardly improved the coding practices as usually gets told.
Not that the answer to this philosophical question solves the issues for everyone affected by the F-35 software problems.
The F-35 is technically capable but even that is subject to export controls despite being purpose-built for export. A lot of European companies have a large stake in the success of the F-35 in its various versions because they are building it for European customers.
Did more information come up during the time period ?
Either way, asking a pilot to not bail out in these circumstances sounds crazy.
When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU).
Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while
Then the military said the reason they had to demote him was that while a normal pilot could have done what he did, he was a test pilot and they're supposed to run closer to the redline.
Overall, that combined with the contemporaneous Secret Service gaffes that nearly had the President whacked while they stood around in photo-op poses, really made me think: What if these people are all playing at their roles and they don't actually know what to do? I know it's general Millennial jokes that "nobody knows what they're doing; we're all just making it up as we go along".
But that's not true. I kind of know a lot of what I'm doing. There's a whole bunch of things where I can just execute with low error rate. These guys are doing something more important and their ancestors did it better. Which makes me think that they're not so good at what they do.
I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are.
The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pilot isn't doing a good job of saying "don't worry about me, let's talk about the plane". He keeps chiming in with these questions about the plane crash that seem to come out of nowhere.
He also doesn't even mention that he's concerned that the plane crash might have injured someone else.
Maybe there's more to this that was edited out.
But I'm not sure what the criticism is: she's supposed to stop asking questions about his injuries, and suddenly ask about a possible plane crash that they haven't had any reports of yet? What would that even achieve?
The DoD spends tons of our tax money on advertising and marketing and partnerships (all those sports game flyovers are paid advertising to the NFL/NCAA by the military) to make it seem like you’ll be some sort of glorious hero if you join up.
> Time passed, and Del Pizzo’s trajectory through the Marine Corps moved upward and steady: deployments to Afghanistan, Kuwait and Japan; deployments to Bahrain for combat missions into Syria for Operation Inherent Resolve. He flew Harriers off amphibious assault ships. At the Pentagon, he was assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff working on Southeast Asia policy, and with Navy staff on amphibious expedition warfare.
I find it difficult to sympathize with those who actually perpetrate foreign invasions, be they Russian or American. It’s hard to care about justice for someone whose job and daily practice is to blow up people they’ve never met and never posed a threat to them.
I completely agree, but I feel this is an entierly different topic (no less important). What they did to him is clearly wrong and the importance of this conclusion is to help us think about similar situations in other settings than the US air force. It is like a philosophical dilema, should you punish someone for trying to save their life and causing damage that could have been avoided? Not everyone answers the same.
Again I agree with your angle, it's perfectly valid
I think the question about “is that something anyone should be working for?” is just as important as “was it fair to the one so working?”.
Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed.
Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess
With low altitude being an aggravating factor he was always 100% correct in ejecting and whatever the plane did afterwards is largely irrelevant.
I don't expect every pilot to go down with their plane, but holy crap. That plane could have taken out half a street of houses. I'm not sure how one pilot's life is worth more than potentially dozens of innocent people who happen to be living under a plane's flight path.
It's a miracle the plane landed in a swamp, of all places. Especially given how long it was in the air flying around on its own. Pretty much anywhere else besides the open ocean and it could have been an epic disaster.
I'm sure this has been expressed in the other thread, but I figured I'd share my shock for the others just reading about this now.
Planes most commonly crash during takeoff and landing (why they turn on the seatbelt sign below 10000ft).
The FAA tries to make sure that approach lanes are mostly clear, but they can't plan for every scenario.
In this case the pilot knew that last time he checked, he was less than a thousand feet off the ground and descending in a plane that was out of his control with no comms (if you want to blame someone, how bout Lockheed?).
He's suppose to spend the next five seconds doing... what exactly?
This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
Instead, he switched the flight mode from STOL to forward flight, misinterpreted the result of that as his engine spooling down, didn't see if he could maneuver the aircraft, didn't do anything with the backup instruments except glance at them, didn't try the backup radio, and punched out.
Sure, he was descending. Did he try to pull up? Did he look at the backup instruments while doing so to see if their response to that agreed with his actions, and thus gain some information as to whether both the flight controls and backup instruments were functional? Seems like he didn't.
I'm not saying I would have made a different decision in his situation. I'm not a pilot, and I can't fathom what being in that situation would have been like. But it sounds like that third mishap report, as well as the Marine brass, believed he should have known that he had more time to ascertain his plane's capabilities at the time.
> This was as textbook a reaction as they could have asked for.
He was a test pilot who was later given command of a group responsible for that textbook. It sounds like he's not supposed to just follow the textbook; he's supposed to know when the textbook is too vague, and dig deeper. Yes, it seems, even in a crisis situation where he might die if he delays his decisions for too long.
And I'm not saying he absolutely should have gone down with the plane if that's what would have happened. But also consider that it seems like a near miracle that the plane didn't eventually come down in a residential area, for instance, and kill a bunch of people, especially considering how long it continued flying after he ejected. It sounds like he only considered that after he was on the ground. He needed to be thinking about that before he pulled that ejection lever.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubern...
From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore.
He didn't try to see if his flight controls (pitch, yaw, roll) were still responding, he didn't make use of the backup instruments, he didn't try the backup radio, and he had enough fuel to land elsewhere. The letter of the procedures may have said that he was in an out-of-control flight condition, but the procedures were too vague, and he should have had the experience to second-guess them and ascertain if his plane was actually out of control.
Sure, maybe all those things wouldn't have worked, and he would have had to eject. Or worse, they wouldn't have worked, and he would have spent enough time trying them that it would have been too late and he would have died.
But for better or worse, the actual outcome does matter: the plane was still flyable, and either a) he would have likely been able to successfully land, possibly at an alternate location with better weather, or b) he would have had the time and flight stability to try a bunch more options before deciding to eject.
I do find the circumstances strange, in how long it took for Marine brass to decide to relieve him of his command and torpedo his career. But I have no frame of reference for or experience around this, so perhaps it's not unusual. If he were just a rank-and-file pilot, he likely would have kept his position and continued on, perhaps with a bit of a bumpy road ahead. But he was given the command of an important group, a group tasked to refine flight procedures around this plane, and that comes with different expectations for his actions in the scenario he was in.
If the article is correct, the issue started when he was 750 feet above the ground depending at 800 feet per minute. He decided to eject approximately 30 seconds layer, at an approximate above ground height of 350 feet. Presuming he decided to continue troubleshooting, he was going to impact the ground in 25 seconds, and the ejection seat does take a few seconds for the pilot to clear the fuselage (and any explosions at impact).
This is a tragic situation to be in. He was under an immense time pressure to make a decision and from his understanding, the plane was out-of-control. He also doesn't know for sure if his rate of decent has accelerated, so he might have been dozens of feet above the ground.
I understand the armchair flying with perfect understanding and time to think it through means that he should have tried more stuff, but in the seat? I would have ejected. I think the majority of folks would have.
> Observe, orient: Jet still in the clouds, about 750 feet above ground, still in his control, descending glide path, about 800 feet per minute
Then brokenness again
> About 30 seconds had passed.
By then he might have been gliding halfway towards terrain.
> He felt the nose of the aircraft tilt upward. He felt a falling sensation.
Subtext is that this feels like stalling with only a few hundred feet and a few seconds left. There's no room to recover control surface.
There's only so much you can read in so little time with fallback instruments. Airspeed means squat, climb rate can be unreliable.
> Forty-one seconds.
Next loop is going to be either nothing happened or ground contact. What to you do.
The "Command report" is available here.[1] But at the point that relevant flight data recorder data ought to appear, it's censored. Power faults and crashes of one of the redundant flight computers are mentioned. No full timeline. The report mentions that the transition to conventional flight mode did happen after the pilot punched out. But there are no technical details as to whether it was slower than normal.
Not enough info to form an opinion.
[1] https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/FOIA/F-35%20Mis...
Do you understand this failure occurred at less than a thousand feet AGL?
And that is how they normalize their atrocities.
I hear America is looking for efficiency and reduced gvt spendings, I'd say the F35 program is a good candidate to start, especially since now many countries aren't so fond of the whole "send all of your military data to our best friends the US of A".
I'd take a bicycle without electronics over an electric vehicle that decides not to start, any day, when picking military hardware.
F-35s has a much lower crash rate than F-16s during their first 20 years in service [2] and just recently passed 1 million flight hours [3]. The program has its problems, but it resulted in an incredibly capable fighter plane. Practically every US ally that has access to the F-35 run their evaluations and concluded that the F-35 is the best option (eg [4], quote: "F-35A offers highest overall benefit at lowest cost by far").
[1]: https://www.gao.gov/blog/f-35-will-now-exceed-2-trillion-mil...
[2]: https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-new-fighter-jets-more...
[3]: https://theaviationist.com/2025/03/04/f-35-one-million-fligh...
[4]: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/media-releas...
Article mention 1/10 critical failure rate (injuries or worse). I wonder how much of a push is made in this direction?
Given (implied in article) sentiment I wouldn’t be very surprised if stakeholders wouldn’t want ejection to be too safe.
Will this mean you accidentally fire some great pilots? Yes. But given the cost of these airplanes it is better to spend some more money on training a few more pilots.
Better to follow protocol and eject. The link is a story where a good pilot followed protocol but still got screwed over.
The plane in this incident was valued at $136M USD.
He was in reality about 1900 feet AGL at the time of ejection. Planes fall around 160 feet per second when stalled.
How much money would you accept to not pull an ejection lever for a few more seconds in a zero-visibility setting without instruments in a falling/stalling plane that you personally are sitting inside? How about at 1900 feet AGL? That’s 12 seconds before impact on a good day.
The materials and labor for a single plane are far lower.
It’s similar to why search and rescue don’t bill you after they’re called - they don’t want to add a reason to hesitate and make your problems worse.
Maybe, maybe not. But I do expect that if another pilot finds himself in Del Pizzo's situation, they're going to do a more thorough survey of the plane's capabilities before ejecting. Maybe that's the outcome the Marines is looking for, even if it puts their pilots at risk more often.
Don't throw good money after bad.
For your loved ones it is infinite.
But for a government with X funds and Y lives to save, there has to be a price.
If someone ejects on every little problem, you spend billions more on that and billions less on some other life saving initiatives.
Putting aside the bad ejection survival stats.
