I recently learned about the Green Ramp disaster, where the crew ejected from an F-16 under full afterburner, and the jet continued on to collide with several parked airplanes, resulting in 24 fatalities.
"As of 2025, this incident has the largest number of ground fatalities for an accidental crash of an aircraft on U.S. soil. It was also the worst peacetime loss of life suffered by the division since the end of World War II."
I think the most proper thing for the jet should be to destroy itself. In a war enviornment I would not like my enemy to gain intel about my military jets.
You could erase computer memory, but blowing up the plane won't stop them from gaining intel about the materials, mechanism, and whatnot that make up the plane. An explosion won't vaporize the airplane, just break it into smallish pieces. Those can be collected and analyzed to reconstruct most any detail about the construction of the airplane. They even do this with missiles and bombs. Even shell fragments. When artillery shells packed full of high explosives go off, their intricate fuse mechanisms are left remarkably intact.
If it's a controlled ejection scenario, you try to fly to a specific location, airspeed, heading, and altitude, then pull. It will be in your local-area in-flight guide. The intent is, the plane ends up somewhere away from civilization. This if, of course, only suitable for scenarios where you have this luxury.
It seems like the sensible thing to do would be to fry / erase any IFF and encryption related stuff, but otherwise continue as before.
E.g, if it's already been programmed to fly straight and level, continue to do that. If it's deactivated, stay deactivated.
Just seems like a whole 'nother set of characteristics to test otherwise, as well as adding extra unpredictability. The aircraft is probably damaged / on fire, so its flight characteristics are already going to be extremely different to normal. The best thing in the moment may be to let the aircraft lawn-dart in a field, rather than attempt to get straight and level, and in the process potentially fly over inhabited area or towards a friendly set of aircraft / buildings / vehicles.
A pilot would only eject if the aircraft was uncontrollable with no reasonable hope for recovery. Unlikely the autopilot can do anything deliberate at that point.
Thinking about this one (https://theaviationist.com/2025/02/12/ea-18g-growler-crashes...), it seems like after ejection you'd want the plane to lawn dart whenever possible. It allows the pilot to know if it is an okay place to ditch and it minimizes the reverse engineering risk.
I imagine there is a good reason this isn't the way things are though.
The analysis and conclusions of the responders here (2018) seem pretty invalidated by the 2024 F-35B ejection incident. Maybe more thought should be put into what the autopilot should do?
A single incident doesn’t invalidate anything. No one has argued that it’s impossible for a fighter to fly on for a significant period of time in good shape after a pilot ejects, or the pilot has never ejected mistakenly out of an air worthy aircraft. Rather the argument is that this is a vanishing rare occurrence and the complexities of trying to implement an unmanned auto pilot of a potentially damaged aircraft are probably not worth the handful of times it might be used. One incident doesn’t disprove that it’s vanishingly rare.
I think we should make an API call to an LLM with the current GPS location to decide what to do, bonus points if we can mount a forward facing camera and upload the picture as well
> The only victim of the accident was Wim Delaere, a computer science student reported to have been either 18 or 19 years old.[4][5][1] He was sleeping alone after celebrating the end of his university exams the previous day when the MiG crashed and killed him at 10:30 am. His mother and brother were shopping for groceries in Kortrijk, and his father was working in Ypres.[4]
From the linked Wikipedia article on one of the answers.
I was astonished at the claim that pilots ejecting can lose half an inch of height due to spinal compression induced by the G-forces. Claims seem to be borne out:
21 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] thread"As of 2025, this incident has the largest number of ground fatalities for an accidental crash of an aircraft on U.S. soil. It was also the worst peacetime loss of life suffered by the division since the end of World War II."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Ramp_disaster
E.g, if it's already been programmed to fly straight and level, continue to do that. If it's deactivated, stay deactivated.
Just seems like a whole 'nother set of characteristics to test otherwise, as well as adding extra unpredictability. The aircraft is probably damaged / on fire, so its flight characteristics are already going to be extremely different to normal. The best thing in the moment may be to let the aircraft lawn-dart in a field, rather than attempt to get straight and level, and in the process potentially fly over inhabited area or towards a friendly set of aircraft / buildings / vehicles.
I imagine there is a good reason this isn't the way things are though.
https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2024...
As an NFT of course.
From the linked Wikipedia article on one of the answers.
What an unlucky kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
https://www.forcesnews.com/news/can-ejecting-aircraft-make-p... https://www.quora.com/Do-pilots-lose-height-when-they-eject-...
If a pilot ejects, what is the autopilot programmed to do? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17391550 - June 2018 (76 comments)