So as a pilot you can't override the software to stop it from "thinking that the plane is on the ground" mode?
Something similar happened recently with A320 when it didn't want to land on an airfield during emergency unless it was flown in a special mode. But F-35 doesn't have that?
I've crashed an RC helicopter because of a similar software issue. Rotorflight is an OSS flight controller, and it has an internal mode for tracking if the vehicle is on the ground or not that isn't always quite accurate at the margins. If you're touching the ground and it's not in ground-handling mode, the I-term in the PID loop winds up really quickly (because the input isn't producing the expected rotation rate) and flips your model on its side.
Betaflight (flight controller for drones, which rotorflight is based on) has a similar function called "air mode" which is common to either disable or set to a switch for aerobatic drones so that they'll still have full rotation rates at zero throttle.
Rafale and Gripen don't hold a candle to the F35's capabilities, they're just a different class of aircraft. Not to say any one of the three is bad, but the EU currently just does not have it in them to have a viable competitor.
Considering they relieved a pilot of command for ejecting when his F-35 become unresponsive, now they make them sit on conference calls. That pilot is very brave, I think others would have ejected by now. Making them fly around up there is ridiculous.
Switzerland, if they want something they can fly for air policing is forced to buy the F35 at what every price the US feels fit (even though the contract with Lockheed states a fixed price, naive politicians and consultants found out the hard way). Of course the CHF to USD conversion is fix at a shit rate from many years ago and from what I understand there is no way around that because the SNB did the conversion back then already.
We have no alternative we can get before 2035. They are talking about extending the F/A-18 but since we would be the only ones still using them we would have to pay for that too at who know what price.
The public approved 6 billion and now it looks like it will be way more, excluding skyrocketing maintenance which is not included and a patriot missile system that when it is finally delivered will cost who knows how many billions.
The whole thing is an absolute shit show here and that's ignoring the technical issues this thing has...
If the USA ever had to go to war with this weapon, a huge number of them would be offline at any given time, and every single airframe loss would cause a huge dent in overall combat power.
I don’t understand why our military and political leaders keep trying to buy ridiculously overpriced Swiss Army knife weapons (lots of flexibility but great at nothing) instead of mass producing combat knives (only good for one thing but great at it and lots of them).
Nah. Parts of the F-35 program were terribly managed (procurement malpractice) but the final product largely works as promised. The whole reason it was developed starting in about 1994 was that exercises and simulations had shown that legacy strike aircraft weren't survivable against modern air defenses: that part hasn't changed, in fact the situation has gotten worse. It doesn't matter how cheap an aircraft is if it can't accomplish the mission.
Perhaps someday cheap, expendable drones will be and to take over the entire mission set. But for now that concept is still science fiction.
> Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.
I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.
Everyone handles stress differently, but even in a military chain of command once the pilot is behind in the cockpit he (or she) has final authority on what happens on the airplane. If a pilot calls to ask for help, they are asking for advice. Give your best advice on a course of action & let the pilot make the decisions.
In a good engineering and a safety culture, a death should never be considered the mistake of a couple individuals. Mistakes are always because of a process failing.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t call myself a software engineer. Very few of us are actually doing anything resembling engineering. I’d have been like, “I can’t reproduce this production bug on my local system,” tagged the issue with ‘needs more info’ and moved on to something else.
The F-35 is unstable by design and requires constant adjustments by the computer system to fly. So it is actually impossible to "just" turn the computer off and fly manually.
They're really not. You're basing this on misinformation and propaganda. The only reason why nobody should be buying them is because the US has become an untrustworthy partner. Otherwise, there is no credible evidence of any kind that I've seen showing the F-35 is anything other than a great fighter jet.
Very different scenario, but flying my puddle jumper one of the first times after getting my license, once I took off from an airport in Connecticut and was about to cross a large body of water, my exhaust temperatures spiked really, really high, essentially indicating the engine was seconds from melting. But it didn't.
So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily with the equipment on board I managed a call to the flight school, who put me in touch with the mechanic. I circled above an airport as he pulled up the maintenance logs, we discussed what I was seeing, he noted that there had been a report of a sensor issue that had been squawked, so we concluded I should feel safe to fly straight home.
At the time it felt insanely cool to be able to be doing that WHILE flying the plane. While an unfortunate outcome for this particular pilot, as an elite pilot, part of me thinks when this cropped up part of him was like: "ahh right, this is why I'm top dog"
If a third of the hydraulic fluid was water, it was like that meme video of the woman who added washer fluid to the car’s oil - no way was that going to work properly.
I'm wondering why these days, when my washing machine has an internet connection, they can't take over control of a plane remotely. I guess it could be considered a security vulnerability, however i'm quite sure it could be done securely.
Like let the pilot eject and you try to land a plane with remote control
> But those attempts failed to recenter the nose wheel and resulted in both the left and right main landing gears freezing up and not being able to extend fully to attempt an actual landing.
> At that point, the F-35’s sensors indicated it was on the ground and the jet’s computer systems transitioned to “automated ground-operation mode,” the report said.
And there wasn't a way to override that? I get that "manual mode" may not be a thing for a SaaS product that isn't critical, but there not being an immediate way to turn off the "drive mode" is quite surprising.
> The report notes Lockheed Martin had issued guidance on the problem the F-35’s
> sensors had in extreme cold weather in a maintenance newsletter in April 2024,
> about nine months before the crash. The problem could make it “difficult for
> the pilot to maintain control of the aircraft,” the guidance said.
>
> The temperature at the time of the crash was -1 degree Fahrenheit, the report
> said.
Isn't it pretty much always at least that cold at the altitudes these things operate at? It's unclear from the article if -1F qualifies as "extreme cold weather" but unless I'm mistaken you're going to encounter extreme cold temps up there - it's not some exceptional condition.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadGovernment or Lockheed Martin or are these 200 million dollar jets insured ?
(I'm aware Zoom meeting limit is 40 minutes)
Is that not what the pilot did anyway? Or is a "controlled ejection" different from what they did?
Something similar happened recently with A320 when it didn't want to land on an airfield during emergency unless it was flown in a special mode. But F-35 doesn't have that?
Are you sure? I can’t seem to find any references to any such incident.
Betaflight (flight controller for drones, which rotorflight is based on) has a similar function called "air mode" which is common to either disable or set to a switch for aerobatic drones so that they'll still have full rotation rates at zero throttle.
We have no alternative we can get before 2035. They are talking about extending the F/A-18 but since we would be the only ones still using them we would have to pay for that too at who know what price.
The public approved 6 billion and now it looks like it will be way more, excluding skyrocketing maintenance which is not included and a patriot missile system that when it is finally delivered will cost who knows how many billions.
The whole thing is an absolute shit show here and that's ignoring the technical issues this thing has...
$200M for one fighter plane is insane.
If the USA ever had to go to war with this weapon, a huge number of them would be offline at any given time, and every single airframe loss would cause a huge dent in overall combat power.
I don’t understand why our military and political leaders keep trying to buy ridiculously overpriced Swiss Army knife weapons (lots of flexibility but great at nothing) instead of mass producing combat knives (only good for one thing but great at it and lots of them).
Perhaps someday cheap, expendable drones will be and to take over the entire mission set. But for now that concept is still science fiction.
I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.
So of course I felt it was a sensor issue (especially since it sounded/felt great), but luckily with the equipment on board I managed a call to the flight school, who put me in touch with the mechanic. I circled above an airport as he pulled up the maintenance logs, we discussed what I was seeing, he noted that there had been a report of a sensor issue that had been squawked, so we concluded I should feel safe to fly straight home.
At the time it felt insanely cool to be able to be doing that WHILE flying the plane. While an unfortunate outcome for this particular pilot, as an elite pilot, part of me thinks when this cropped up part of him was like: "ahh right, this is why I'm top dog"
https://martin-baker.com/tie-club/
> At that point, the F-35’s sensors indicated it was on the ground and the jet’s computer systems transitioned to “automated ground-operation mode,” the report said.
And there wasn't a way to override that? I get that "manual mode" may not be a thing for a SaaS product that isn't critical, but there not being an immediate way to turn off the "drive mode" is quite surprising.
/s