[HN Gopher] F-35 can't be found after pilot ejected
___________________________________________________________________
F-35 can't be found after pilot ejected
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 105 points
Date : 2023-09-18 06:01 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thedrive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thedrive.com)
| juanani wrote:
| [dead]
| jiripospisil wrote:
| Should have put an AirTag on it. I'm kidding. Maybe.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Planes have transponders to make it easier to find them, though
| that's mostly for when they are in the air. The issue is that
| the military likes to turn them off.
| dumah wrote:
| Relevant crashes into swamps:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ValuJet_Flight_592
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_co...
| jmclnx wrote:
| >"Now that I got that out of the way. How in the hell do you lose
| an F-35?" South Carolina Republican Representative Nancy Mace
| said on social media. "How is there not a tracking device and
| we're asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?"
|
| Sure lets put tracking devices in these stealth planes, will make
| it easy for anyone to find, even the Russians or Chinese.
|
| How dumb can a Congress Person get, they surprise me everyday.
| johnklos wrote:
| How dumb could a person be, suggesting that something be
| installed in an expensive airplane that couldn't possibly ever
| be turned off!
|
| Sigh.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Turning it on would be very hard after a crash. Plus if you
| eject and you turn it on, the "other" people could trace it
| too. AFAIK, the purpose of F-35s are to be used in hostile
| areas, not only training.
|
| Also, ever hear of cracking" ? You think hackers in China
| could not crack that tracker given enough time ? Stealth
| usually means "unable to track" in case you are wondering :)
| rmbyrro wrote:
| > "How in the hell do you lose an F-35? ... How is there not a
| tracking device...?" -- South Carolina Republican Representative
| Nancy Mace
|
| Considering it is a _stealth_ jet, broadcasting its location
| through easily detectable radio waves would be a serious bug, not
| a feature, wouldn 't it?
| andbberger wrote:
| stealth aircraft usually fly with radar retroreflectors
| deployed when not on combat missions so as to prevent
| adversaries from assessing their cross-section
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Sounds like a job for Rainbolt
| btbuildem wrote:
| An 80's movie dream is playing out for some rural kids, where
| they stumble upon a smouldering high-tech wreckage and as they
| explore it, men in suits pour out of black SUVs and talk to them
| in taciturn ways.
|
| Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how
| unreliable they seem to be.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| An iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 40.
| cypress66 wrote:
| There's a lot of very low volume niche Chinese phones for
| reasonable prices. So it doesn't need to be so expensive.
|
| You could argue that an iPhone would cost over a billion
| because you need to develop iOS. But why would you do that
| instead of modding android for 1/100th of the cost, if you're
| only gonna make 40?
| ncallaway wrote:
| The hardware for the niche Chinese phones can only be so
| cheap, because an ecosystem exists around the mass
| production that is built around the mainstream iPhone and
| Android devices.
|
| If not for the insane scale of phones being developed, the
| components that go into those cheap Chinese phones would be
| far far far more expensive than they are today.
| bumby wrote:
| This assumes the aircraft analogy uses all one-off parts,
| no? It would be interesting to see if there's any data
| available on this. I would expect big ticket items like
| the engines to be bespoke, but even they would likely use
| some common parts. I'd imagine it's not likely every seal
| or bolt would be unique to that airframe.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Cheap Chinese phones get to take the mass production
| benefits of the iPhone and Android markets and then
| *relax* most of the requirements to get cheaper parts.
|
| The military tends to *tighten* the requirements when
| it's procuring parts, so more things end up as custom
| development.
|
| I have no idea what ratio something like an F-35 is for
| COTS vs custom hardware, though.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm not sure there's much relaxing in quality control in
| aerospace. The specs are already pretty tight.
| rbanffy wrote:
| You could, but usually that causes lower performance.
| When building an airframe, a gram not needed is a gram
| wasted. In fighters it's far less stringent than
| spacecraft - for those, even a screw one turn longer than
| needed is something to avoid.
| bumby wrote:
| (FWIW, when I'm saying 'aerospace' I'm using it to
| jointly refer to "space" and "aeronautics," just in case
| I gave the impression I was only talking about
| spaceflight.)
|
| Those are technical specs, not quality specs. The quality
| specs would deal with things like machining tolerances,
| manufacturer traceability, etc.
|
| Point being, if Pratt & Whitney took a seal design from
| another aircraft to apply to the F-35, it's not like they
| aren't already tracking the tolerances, material
| compatibility, etc. When I worked in aerospace, it was
| very rare that we went to the machine shop to ask for
| them to make a bespoke component.
| tristanb wrote:
| it wouldn't be an iPhone then.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd love to have a civilian version of the F-35 for joyride
| operators, but I guess half of the point of a military
| aircraft is that your enemies can't buy one.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| There's a private company that has bought F-16s now. They
| do work with the military, but they're still a private
| company. If someone were able to get an F-16 and sell
| rides, I'd be willing to fork over a fairly absurd amount
| of money.
| qzw wrote:
| The Musk v Zuckerberg cage fight would've been much better
| as a dog fight between their private F-35s. I mean, why
| should mega billionaires fight the same way any two broke
| guys from Jersey would anyway?
| pohl wrote:
| I've seen some analysis that, per hour of flight time, these
| tend towards the most trouble-free end of the spectrum. Someone
| will need to run those numbers again, of course, but I wouldn't
| be surprised if, even with this incident, that was still the
| case.
| aftbit wrote:
| The real question IMO is whether the 6th generation fighters
| (Next Generation Air Dominance program in the USA) are making
| the right design trade offs. They are projected to be bigger,
| more expensive, and ordered in fewer numbers than even the
| F-22. Are we better off with fewer but more advanced super
| weapons, or with many more cheaper weapons? In the era of UA/RU
| war where few-thousand-dollar drones are spanking multi-million
| dollar EW and AA systems, this may not be the right trade off.
| justrealist wrote:
| Yeah, far more F35s will be ordered than F22s, in the end the
| program ground out a pretty successful jet.
|
| The next generation may be the questionable one.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The Air Force and Navy NGAD programs are separate and
| different. The Air Force is building a fighter larger than
| the F-22 cause they want the range to fly across the Pacific.
| They are also working on wingman drones and already gave
| order.
|
| The Navy NGAD is more of a replacement for the F/A-18E/F. It
| will probably be the same size because of constraints of
| carrier. Another difference is that the Air Force is working
| fast while Navy NGAD won't be ready until 2030.
| nradov wrote:
| Unfortunately there is no alternative. In order to be
| relevant in a potential conflict with China around the first
| island chain, NGAD must have a size and fuel fraction similar
| to the F-111. It will probably also need a second crew
| position to manage the workload including controlling "loyal
| wingman" type disposable drones. There's just no way to do
| that on the cheap.
|
| Small, cheap drones have been effective in Ukraine because
| the ranges are so short. The battle space in the South China
| Sea is completely different.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The F-35 has a comparable or better safety record than most
| other American Fighters. You just don't see articles written
| about a single aircraft incident for the F-18 anymore.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| You'd hate the F-104, which killed 116 pilots while in German
| service, which is the kind of casualty rate you'd expect from
| actual war, not training.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-104_Starfighter#Wes...
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| My personal favorite is the short story "Night Rescue" from
| Bertrand Brinley's Mad Scientist Club books.
|
| http://madscientistsclub.com/books.html
| XorNot wrote:
| Criticism of the F-35 has been coming from a vocal selection of
| loons who's most common media appearances tended to be on
| Russia Today, and who's qualifications have been to lie about
| their qualifications, and misrepresent actual events which
| happened.
|
| Here's the thing: you don't know anything about the F-35.
| Because the project is secret. The capabilities are secret. And
| in a US political system that's incredibly fractious, civilian
| oversight has been satisfied with the project for multiple
| administrations. But it's still _secret_.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I was an early armchair skeptic, and I've always had a not-
| so-secret love of the F-16. But after watching an F-35 demo
| at a recent airshow, I'm a convert. Anyone who says this
| plane can't out-dogfight an F-16 is delusional.
| foxyv wrote:
| Fighter jets in general are a constant maintenance marathon.
| They are pushing the edge of engineering and performance. That
| means that they are less reliable and more expensive to
| maintain than a 777 by a wide margin. However, the F-35 is
| significantly more reliable than it's predecessor the F-16.
|
| The F-35 represents the result of a changing model for warfare.
| Less dogfights and missile duels, more managing a fleet of
| strike drones, loitering ordinance, ECM, and acting as an
| observability platform. With the advent of extreme long range,
| datalink guided, air breathing, air to air missiles, BVR is
| transitioning to over the horizon combat. I see you, I kill
| you. F-35 is a reaction to that.
| mortureb wrote:
| We got to move away from fighter jets for the most part. It's
| the age of slaughterbots baby, bring on the tens of thousands
| of highly intelligent drones.
| pookha wrote:
| F35 has a lower mission capability rate than the F-16, and
| it's not even close (< 50% vs 73%). They're complicated
| (overly) machines...The DOD industry has come a long ways
| from Edwards Demming.
| foxyv wrote:
| According to the GAO, the F-35 has a much better MCR than
| the F-16. However, the UH-1N Huey has a higher mission
| capability rate than ALL of these aircraft. Be careful
| which metric you optimize for or you will be attempting to
| fight artillery with trebuchets.
|
| https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106217
| kunwon1 wrote:
| I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts
| (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being
| said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very
| successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I
| haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be
| wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual
| knowledge about.
|
| A broad overview of my understanding of the situation: Most
| critics are making unfair comparisons (e.g. criticizing the
| F-35 for its inability to dogfight, or comparing its cost to
| 4th generation fighters, rather than its 5th generation peers)
|
| This argument is further complicated by (as I understand it) a
| general lack of knowledge in the west concerning the true cost
| of Russian and Chinese 5th generation fighters (PAK FA and
| Su-57)
|
| All of that being said, I think this is a heavily politicized
| topic, and I can never discount the possibility that I've been
| hoodwinked when it comes to such matters.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| https://www.aviacionline.com/2022/01/f-35-cheaper-than-
| the-g...
|
| Specific figures will differ depending on how exactly one
| calculates acquisition costs. These numbers differ depending
| on the acquiring country, the block numbers, etc. But as rule
| of thumb the F-35 cost is roughly 10 million USD cheaper than
| the much less capable Gripen. This is notable as the Gripen
| is being marketed as the cheaper alternative. The F-35 has
| much higher operational costs (mostly due to the costs of
| maintaining stealth coating), but here's the opinion of the
| Finish and Swiss governments on full life-cycle costs from
| the article:
|
| > However, both the Swiss and Finnish authorities argued that
| the F-35 was the best cost/benefit investment, if its full
| life-cycle economics were taken into account.
| flakeoil wrote:
| From the article the cost per flight hour is around $8,000
| for Gripen and $33,300 for the F35A.
|
| The Finish and Swiss most likely have no clue what the
| final full life-cycle costs will be. No-one knows this
| cost. The US who sold it knows a bit more than the Finns
| and the Swiss, but not even they know. Time will tell.
|
| The F35 program has overrun it's costs over and over. The
| purchase price of the F35A (the conventional version) is
| being artificially low as a lot of the costs have been
| pushed onto the F35B and F35C models so they can offer an
| attractive price for their exports.
|
| It's all politics at the end anyway.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Ligh
| tning...
| hollerith wrote:
| If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have
| chosen to buy it? Consulting this next page, I count 8
| countries besides the US that have taken delivery of F-35s,
| plus many that have ordered it, but not yet taken delivery:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning.
| ..
|
| The UK for example currently has a fleet of 32, and Australia
| has 50.
| pydry wrote:
| Because it cost $2 trillion and it's so so. Mostly becausr
| it cost $2 trillion. $2 trillion is a fair chunk of cash.
|
| Allies buying American hardware isnt necessarily a sign of
| quality, also. America puts pressure on them to buy its
| hardware.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Turkey seems awfully broken up about not being allowed to
| buy the F-35.
| pydry wrote:
| Turkey had a choice between S400s from Russia and F-35s
| and they chose the S400. Theyve since doubled down on
| that choice.
|
| Realistically it was probably the better choice.
|
| The US MIC was probably more cut up about it than Turkey
| which is probably why this stunt was pulled:
| https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/06/29/us-could-
| buy...
| mannerheim wrote:
| Russian air defence has had a rather poor showing lately,
| so perhaps not.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I think that's a skill issue. Ukrainians are operating
| similar equipment with better success. Much like how
| India and China seem to have no problems operating the
| sister ships of the kuznetsov
| mannerheim wrote:
| Air defence was a weak point for Ukraine until Western
| countries provided some. As for the S-400, it's a post-
| Soviet design, and if the T-14 is vaporware and the Su-57
| overhyped at best, perhaps one should not take claims on
| the S-400's capabilities at face value, especially given
| that there is visually confirmed evidence for two of them
| having been destroyed.
| pydry wrote:
| A window or two in Moscow needed repairs I suppose.
|
| Like the storm shadows I'm still waiting for my
| invitation to the much vaunted Crimea beach party.
| vGPU wrote:
| Even if it was come to a war situation where they had to
| trade off 10 s-400's for a single f-35, they'd still be
| significantly ahead financially from what I remember.
| morkalork wrote:
| It's both until its not. If only 1 or 2 countries signed
| up, it'd be an expensive failure. If everyone signs up,
| cost go down and economies of scale make it a wild success.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Yeah, F35 turned into something I would never have
| anticipated: it's actually not that expensive anymore.
| jowea wrote:
| There's a bit of a problem because even if it's a (partial)
| failure as far as project management goes, competition is
| so low that if you're a US-aligned state and want a 5th
| generation fighter, the F-35 is still the only reasonable
| option.
|
| In general, even if something is awful as product and its
| development was a disaster, if it's monopoly on something
| important it is still going to sell.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm not taking a side on this particular issue, but there
| are many reasons a person or a country might buy something
| that wasn't very good, even if they knew it wasn't.
| Maintaining a relationship with the vendor (aka a foreign
| nation with whom you maintain diplomatic/economic
| relations) is a big one.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have
| chosen to buy it?_
|
| What's the alternative? How many other models can be
| purchased at all?
|
| Canada went through a bunch of drama to find a replacement
| for the legacy F/A-18s, and the main options were:
| Eurofighter Typhoon, Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, F-35,
| and the Saab Gripen.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightn
| ing...
|
| Gripen wasn't in the same league, so we basically have the
| Typhoon and SuperHornet as other options, and both were at
| least a decade older with regards to their 'base' design
| (though there have been further upgrades).
|
| So if you're going to be stuck with a plane for 20+ years,
| you might as well pick the newest model year.
|
| Personally I'd be happy with the Super Hornets (and thrown
| in some Growlers) for Canada given "6G" fighters are
| starting to be designed--basically skipping the "5G" F-35--
| but Boeing were a bunch of dumbasses when the decision was
| being made:
|
| * https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/18/justin-trudeau-says-
| canada-w...
| eevilspock wrote:
| > Personally I'd be happy with...
|
| There's a lot of armchair quarterbacking in these
| comments, this one taking the cake.
| 23B1 wrote:
| HN weighing in on military stuff is always comedy to
| those of us who've been in the military. It's nobody's
| fault - this stuff can be baroque in its complexity - but
| it does make for some entertaining reading!
| simmerup wrote:
| HN weighing in on anything outside of tech is comedy
| lukev wrote:
| Also tech, a good portion of the time.
| debo_ wrote:
| Management is the most comedic topic of all, but it
| borders on tragedy.
| Kuinox wrote:
| Because they are buying USA weapons, not the weapons that
| fits what their country needs.
| https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/fighter-jet-
| purchase--...
| ozim wrote:
| It is quite clear dogfights happen only in the movies. But
| all my knowledge about fighter jets comes from YouTube
| fighter jet pilot channels.
| mrtksn wrote:
| All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove
| detrimental in a warfare.
|
| With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably
| get harder and harder to justify carrying a biological being
| and all the support systems onboard. At some point, a
| warplane capabilities might become irrelevant and the only
| important aspect would the the implications of carrying a
| solder onboard and making the downing of the device much more
| politically significant than downing a drone.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The F-35 was designed with the capability to be later
| converted to remote operation, turning it into a drone
| (they call it a remotely piloted aircraft).
|
| Of course whether the F-35 platform makes sense for that
| role is a different question. There are probably great
| niches for a drone F-35 (e.g. targeting anti-air
| installations), but Ukraine shows that having lots of
| $1000-$100,000 drones might be more valuable on the
| battlefield than one $75,000,000 drone.
| nradov wrote:
| The cheap drones work well in Ukraine where the
| adversaries are locked into attrition fights with largely
| static positions at short ranges. But those drones lack
| the range, speed, and sensors necessary to be effective
| in a potential conflict with China around the first
| island chain. The US military is currently pivoting to
| focus on that scenario.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you're trying to defend the beaches of Taiwan or the
| Philippines, cheap drones sound like a great asset. If
| you're trying to project power into Chinese mainland less
| so.
|
| A big reason why the US will continue to prefer drones
| measured in tons instead of grams is that cheap drones
| are most useful when you have boots on the ground, which
| the US likes to avoid. But with the budgets available
| it's not like they have to choose between F-35 sized
| drones and Dji Mini sized drones, they can just get both.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| XorNot wrote:
| Drones operating in the fighter plane envelope are going to
| be basically the same plane.
|
| Which the US is wholly aware of given the "Loyal Wingman"
| program, which the F-35 is designed to work with:
| commanding unmanned fighters/aircraft as support or missile
| trucks if what have you
| DanHulton wrote:
| The big "advancements in AI" in recent years have all been
| around LLMs, and there's really no way I want one of those
| driving a jet.
|
| And even aside from that, self-driving cars still regularly
| are observed to make stupid mistakes. When warplanes start
| making stupid mistakes, the consequences are going to be a
| lot more dire.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| They've been in transformer models... which we've seen
| bring SOTA image segmentation that would have taken
| millions of dollars and armies of researchers to match
| become widely available https://segment-anything.com/
|
| 'Advancements in AI' have reached a point where they can
| affect everything from your smartphone to a box of
| cereal.
| njarboe wrote:
| I believe the F-35 software is designed to allow it to be
| sort of a forward base for controlling a large number of
| drones.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| > > All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones
| prove detrimental in a warfare.
|
| I highly doubt it. At least I hope so.
|
| Nobody dreams of becoming a drone pilot. At the end of the
| day it's a cubicle job.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| How do drones get around the issue of communications
| jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be
| one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut
| off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to
| changing conditions will almost always have some advantage.
| Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system
| that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack
| plan.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > How do drones get around the issue of communications
| jamming?
|
| For one, by making it harder to jam in the first place.
| Starlink with its extremely directional antennas is a
| good example - an opponent would need an equally massive
| fleet of satellites or high-altitude ECM planes to jam
| it, and the latter ones can easily be targeted by anti-
| radar rockets.
|
| This is why the US government has been pushing insane
| amounts of money into SpaceX... Starlink is the future of
| interconnected wars.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > Starlink is the future of interconnected wars.
|
| Maybe, but what do you figure the US military will use?
| recursive wrote:
| Starshield
| pjc50 wrote:
| SpaceX is not fully under operational control of the US
| government, if some of the reports from Twitter about
| geofencing are to be believed.
| jsight wrote:
| I have yet to see a credible report of them denying a US
| government request.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Big big big big difference between "they usually do what
| we ask" and "we have operational authority over this
| system, and can court martial anyone that impedes its
| operation"
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Assuming that the US ever enters any war directly, guess
| what their first action will be: take Musk out of the
| picture, deal with the legalities later on.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The legality isn't in question; Defense Production Act
| very much applies.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Which is partly why the DoD commissioned a second
| constellation specifically for military use:
| https://www.spacex.com/starshield/
| nradov wrote:
| A near peer adversary will attempt to degrade Starlink
| (and other military satellite constellations) as their
| first step in any major conflict. China is making huge
| investments into EW, cyber, and ASAT. The US military has
| to plan to fight with little or no satellite support.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The plane-sized drones are capable of some autonomous
| operation. It may or may not be possible to spoof that: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_inc
| id...
|
| The smaller drones are not usually autonomous. See the
| Starlink alleged incident.
|
| Inertial guidance is popular but very expensive to do
| accurately with laser gyros. I'm surprised there haven't
| been more "terrain following" systems.
|
| There's probably always going to be a continuum between
| manned and unmanned platforms, and a discussion about
| SEAD.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > See the Starlink alleged incident.
|
| Ukraine says it happened and Musk does too - is 'alleged'
| needed?
| seanr88 wrote:
| [flagged]
| lostlogin wrote:
| But one says 'I did it' and the other says 'he did it'.
|
| What other agenda could be going on here? They are both
| hiding some Russian capabilities from us?
| mrtksn wrote:
| > How do drones get around the issue of communications
| jamming
|
| The same way the F-35 does I guess. Besides, it's pretty
| common for AI systems to overtake human capabilities
| these days, so when jammed they can just carry on.
|
| Sure, they do mistakes but humans do these too and the
| advantage of not carrying 80kg of fragile human and all
| the life support systems onboard is quite significant. It
| makes the thing much cheaper, it removes the need to come
| back thus doubles the range, it makes the thing smaller
| thus harder to detect and destroy, it doesn't have to
| limit its manoeuvres to human levels this makes the thing
| much more agile.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > The same way the F-35 does I guess.
|
| No, because that's in part "let the human pilot make
| decisions".
|
| > Besides, it's pretty common for AI systems to overtake
| human capabilities these days...
|
| Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort of
| decisions.
| k12sosse wrote:
| > Tarnak Farm incident
|
| Canada's first losses in a combat zone since Korean War.
|
| > "Let's just make sure that it's, that it's not
| friendlies, is all"
|
| > Twenty-two seconds later, he reported a direct hit. Ten
| seconds later, the controller ordered the pilots to
| disengage, saying the forces on the ground were
| "friendlies Kandahar".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The argument is not "humans never make a mistake".
|
| There's little evidence autonomous combat fighter AIs are
| better than humans at tough calls of this nature. They
| may be someday, but given the state of the art in self-
| driving, that day probably hasn't arrived.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Weren't they in Croatia under UNPROFOR in the Medak
| pocket?
| mrtksn wrote:
| let the human pilot make decisions == let the machine
| make decisions
|
| It's not like pilots are making political decisions. They
| pilot and shoot predefined targets, avoid hostile
| actions. AI is capable of doing this.
|
| > Not in the realm of "should I shoot that thing?" sort
| of decisions.
|
| On the contrary, AI is very capable of making that
| decision. There are no philosophical dilemmas or children
| in the skies and even if there were we are at the point
| where we can tell the device not shoot children. There
| will be mistakes but human pilots makes mistakes too.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| I'm more worried about domestic use. It's hard to get
| soldiers to carpet bomb wrong thinkers.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > It's hard to get soldiers to carpet bomb wrong
| thinkers.
|
| I'm not sure how accurate that is historically.
| nradov wrote:
| Nonsense. AI can work well enough for striking certain
| known targets. But it is simply not capable of following
| complex rules of engagement or adapting to highly dynamic
| situations in real time. We are at least decades away
| from that capability in a general sense. What you see in
| movies is not reality.
|
| Sixth-generation tactical aircraft (the successors to the
| F-35) are likely to be optionally manned. They will be
| able to operate with remote pilots and/or autonomous
| control for high risk strike missions but most of the
| time will still have human crews on board.
| mrtksn wrote:
| If you haven't notice, lately AI is pretty good at woking
| with information that never seen before.
| Angostura wrote:
| It's also pretty good at hallucinating convincingly.
| closewith wrote:
| > It's not like pilots are making political decisions.
|
| In the age of the Strategic Corporal, they absolutely
| are.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Military pilots absolutely make all sorts of decisions,
| like "that looks like a civilian target, maybe I have
| incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran into the target
| area" or "the controller says I just shot at friendlies".
|
| I would not currently trust an AI to handle those very
| well.
|
| What would an AI have done in this situation? What
| _should_ it have done? "Russian pilot deliberately fired
| missiles at a Royal Air Force surveillance plane in
| international airspace over the Black Sea last year":
| https://apnews.com/article/uk-russia-fighter-jet-missile-
| bla...
| mrtksn wrote:
| AI can absolutely say "that looks like a civilian target,
| maybe I have incorrect info" or "a little kid just ran
| into the target area" or "the controller says I just shot
| at friendlies".
|
| What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those into
| decision making? Pilots do these through instruments
| anyway.
| alistairSH wrote:
| The same AI that gets confused when you stick a traffic
| cone on the hood? Yeah, I don't want that algorithm
| deciding who to bomb.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > What makes you think that AI can't incorporate those
| into decision making?
|
| The fact that state-of-the-art AI already fails at much
| simpler decisions.
|
| In the case of the Black Sea incident, the potential
| consequences include _global thermonuclear war_.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Or the USS Liberty for that matter.
| darknavi wrote:
| Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez is a great book (great in
| audio book form!) about autonomous drones and comms
| blackouts.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Can you give us a TLDR what it says about comms blackouts
| and jamming?
| fragmede wrote:
| The book talks about how they serve multiple purposes.
| They can be used to hinder enemy operations, mask one's
| own activities, or isolate units to force them into pre-
| defined roles. Increasing reliance on digital and
| wireless communications in warfare can thus be viewed as
| a double-edged sword, offering advantages but also
| creating new vulnerabilities.
| vGPU wrote:
| Can't jam every frequency.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _How do drones get around the issue of communications
| jamming?_
|
| AESA derivatives as bidirectional communication devices
| seem like they will render jamming a lot less effective.
| Simply by virtue of being able to pump radar levels of
| power into communication.
|
| And current trends seem to be converging on flocks of
| drones, of which one or two can be specialized with
| uplink. Or simply babysat by stealthy HALE platforms like
| the RQ-180.
|
| You'll have to blanket an area with ungodly amounts of
| energy to fully jam point-to-point, highly directional
| links, especially for close range hops.
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour
| the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was
| that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than
| the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war
| that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you
| couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases,
| runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is
| preferable to have a low tech; that fancy new wifi connected
| oven can be great, until your wifi goes out for a few days
| and you find out that it won't turn on, and you have to get a
| special maintenance guy.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| IMO it's more a multirole/strike aircraft.
|
| The A-10 is great, but you can replace 1 A-10 with 100
| loitering drones and get 90% of the capability.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The F-35 is for deleting (or helping others delete) air
| defenses and other fighter aircraft. Once those are gone
| you can use whatever you want for CAS. I can't imagine
| troops being so far forward that the air above is still
| contested.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also this cannot be stressed enough: you _can 't fly
| under radar anymore_.
|
| Modern radar can detect and track low flying aircraft
| just fine.
| histriosum wrote:
| Genuinely interested in how modern radar would get around
| the line of sight issues? Doesn't line of sight mean that
| yes, you absolutely can still fly under radar?
| [deleted]
| lumost wrote:
| It is unnecessary to have a manned CAS fighter doing
| strafing runs. A cheap Drone in the 1-5MM range could do
| the job better. Or rely on high altitude/stealth precision
| bombing.
|
| The A-10 was built for a war in Europe that never came. You
| can see how well the equivalent SU-25 Frogfoot fairs
| against Manpads in Ukraine today.
| valec wrote:
| The F-35 has a much faster response time than the A-10--
| and, more importantly, survivability. In a contested
| environment, "suboptimal" CAS from an F-35 dropping
| precision munitions is much better than non at all (A-10
| would get shot out of the sky by any near-peer before it
| could approach the theater).
|
| The A-10 also has high maintenance costs and a relatively
| low loiter time. For fighting terrorists in flipflops,
| something like a super-tucano does its job for a tenth of
| the operating cost.
|
| Fundamentally, the A-10 was not built for CAS. It was built
| as a last-ditch, suicide strafer of Soviet convoys during a
| land war in Europe. Very few were projected to survive past
| the first week.
| dogman144 wrote:
| This is an... unorthodox take from the ground
| commander/fires perspective or conversely the orthodox
| take from the USAF perspective.
|
| Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the
| most capable CAS platform, and it's taught as such in all
| joint fires classes to forward observers and also via
| unit history/anecdotes fires units ("A10 saved my butt in
| '12"). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep
| for CAS than F16 etc units (w/e the USAF name is?).
|
| As in, from the ground units perspective, the unit
| actually needing and coordinating the CAS, everything
| you've argued is against the grain.
|
| However, the USAF has been running the exact argument
| you're using for years.
|
| What matters more - IRL combat experience and successes
| with the A10 platform, or the 10 year PR campaign to get
| rid of it for no good reason from the combat perspective.
| valec wrote:
| > Hard lessons from the GWOT which must be unlearned for
| an neer-peer engagement.
|
| and again, a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with
| smart bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but
| significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to
| boot.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > a turboprop light attack aircraft armed with smart
| bombs can play a similar role as an A10 for CAS but
| significantly cheaper and with a longer loiter-time to
| boot.
|
| Well, if you ignore how much quicker it will be shot down
| (in any environment where at least one of the two would
| be usable at all against combat forces), sure.
|
| OTOH, the set of environments in which even the A-10 is
| usable is only going to shrink over time.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| The point is if you're in an environment the A10 survives
| in, so would the prop aircraft. If you aren't, neither
| works anyway. The A10 exists in a middle ground where it
| is much more expensive but not really any less vulnerable
| regardless.
| ianburrell wrote:
| The most capable CAS platform, and one of the most widely
| used, was the B-1 bomber. Flying in circles for hours and
| dropping scores of guided bombs.
|
| The best CAS in GWOT would have been the Super Tucano if
| the program hadn't taken so long. It would have done the
| same job as A-10 but much cheaper.
|
| The CAS mission is obsolete outside of counterinsurgency.
| MANPADs mean that going low and slow is a death trap.
| Getting low and slow was needed in the past to identify
| targets and make dumb weapons accurate. Now fighters fly
| at medium altitude for safety and drop guided weapons.
| Ukraine shows that medium altitude is dangerous with
| near-peer conflict without air supremacy.
|
| The F-35 is required to gain air supremacy. If you have
| them, might as well use them for ground support. I think
| drones will change things with CAS. On one end, can have
| small attack helicopter drones for direct support. On the
| other, can have large drone that loiters for long time
| dropping bombs. The F-35 will be used for things it is
| good at.
| kilolima wrote:
| As long as the Air Farce runs CAS, instead of the army,
| they will continue to attempt to kill any mission that
| doesn't involve winning wars through the holy doctrine of
| Air Power (ie incinerating as many civilians as
| possible).
| dralley wrote:
| ...Is this supposed to be a defence of the A-10?
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| Is the GWOT relevant though? It seems like one of the
| biggest issues the us military is facing a shift back
| towards "conventional" military matters, aka potential
| future faceoff's with China or Russia. These opponents
| field a significantly different set of weapons than we
| saw in GWOT.
| dogman144 wrote:
| The mil has accounted for "Near-peer" training scenarios
| at the training centers (literal war prep, "enemy force"
| with their own tanks etc) since mid 2010's. A10 still
| features in them.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| And the A-10 was built before the MANPAD threat become
| serious. Sneak in at treetop level against gunners in
| turrets and you very well might be able to get in and get
| out in reasonable safety. Now, you'll be getting out with
| a missile (or maybe even more--the response will not be
| coordinated, those who have a launcher and a shot will
| take it) on your tail--it can't be evaded, you have to
| decoy it or blind it.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The replacement for the A10 is the AC-130.
|
| F35 is the multirole fighter. You build it because you
| don't know if you are doing a stealth mission, a dogfight,
| CAS or wild weasel.
|
| F35 can do it all, but as a jack of all trades master of
| none.
|
| -------
|
| Consider the A10 in the current Ukrainian war: CAS is
| impossible because both sides have too much antiair. You
| need wild weasel (aka: anti-air defense) fighters right
| now.
|
| Eventually, one sides air defense will be destroyed to the
| point where CAS is needed. A multirole fighter can perform
| both jobs.
|
| While a specialized wild weasel (ex: stealth bombers) would
| be kinda useless after air defenses are down. While A10 is
| useless before air defenses are down.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I think MANPADs somewhat negate traditional Wild Weasel
| tactics.
|
| Wild Weasel worked because you could use a jet as bait to
| find the position of a SAM site. That worked fine when a
| SAM site was multiple trailers, and took a day to move.
|
| With MANPADs, you don't have a fixed base, and if you
| discover where one is (because it shot at you), that
| information isn't useful, because by the time you know
| where it is, it isn't a SAM site anymore.
|
| I suspect that when fighting wars against people that
| aren't insurgents, we end up being much better off with
| remote piloting, and relatively cheap guided munitions
| for air support. I.E. its a strategic win to get your $3k
| drones shot down by $50k MANPADs.
| dragontamer wrote:
| MANPADs can't even shoot at a jet because they're flying
| too high. There's only so much rocket propellant you can
| put onto a shoulder-mounted device that humans have to
| carry around.
|
| If you're only guarded by MANPADs, then a traditional
| bomber will blast your position repeatedly. The MANPADs
| are really there to deal with low-flying aircraft (A10
| and Helicopters).
|
| EDIT: I guess the AC-130 cruises at high speeds, but
| since its gun-based it has to drop relatively low... 7000
| ft or less, which might open it up to MANPADs.
|
| But the lower your aircraft, the more at risk vs MANPADs.
| Helicopters and A10 are probably the worst off since
| they're far lower to the ground than even an AC-130.
|
| Furthermore, the AC-130 has the AN/AAR-44 Missile
| Approach Warning Systems, and a _TON_ of flares to
| misdirect missiles like a MANPAD. The A10 doesn't have
| nearly as many flares and is therefore far more
| vulnerable.
|
| -------------
|
| Anyway, CAS are vulnerable to MANPADs (be it A10 or
| AC-130) because of their mission type.
|
| But jet fighters and fighter-bombers, like the F35 or F16
| (or at least, fighters that can play the fighter-bomber
| role) fly too high and too fast to ever be hit by a
| MANPAD. They're only worried about the bigger missiles
| who have enough propulsion to actually reach 10,000+
| feet.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| But you have to fly low to avoid the area SAM defense.
| Stuff like the Patriot doesn't stop enemy aircraft, it
| forces them down low where MANPADs and even guns are
| useful.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Wild Weasel literally is baiting SAM to shoot at them.
| That's the point of Wild Weasel, you bait the RADAR then
| kill the air defense before they lock in on you. Any
| RADAR works by emitting radio waves, and those radio
| waves can be tracked with a homing missile.
|
| Just looking at the wild weasel causes the RADAR system
| to possibly be bombed. SAM installations vs Wild Weasel
| tactics are very complex.
|
| In any case...if your SAM is too scared to engage with
| the wild weasel, they just bomb you from 12,000 feet
| altitudes.
|
| Winning at 12,000 feet altitudes 50 miles away is the
| point of the US Air Force. Their goal is to never even
| engage at lower altitudes until they know they have won
| in the standoff, long range game.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Using drones to bait them like in Baghdad in 1991 would
| work too.
|
| How would something like that help Ukraine? Does Russia
| even need HARM when they have so much artillery they can
| just turn the surroundings of the radar site into the
| surface of the moon? My understanding is Ukraine
| preserved its air defenses by moving them right before
| 2/24 and is betting on Russian cruise missile avionics
| and military intelligence sucking.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Drones won't work for stealth because you need the radio-
| wave link.
|
| F35 is better because the pilot can turn off all
| communications when doing the SAED mission, forcing the
| enemy RADAR to increase their power to even try to see
| the F35. I don't think drones are in a position (yet) to
| go radio-silent and accomplish their mission.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > Because its large profile and low operating altitudes
| around 7,000 feet (2,100 m) make it an easy target, its
| close air support missions are usually flown at night.[7]
|
| AC-130 is only effective against a flipflop army... which
| doesn't have a _friend_ which would supply tons of
| MANPADs to the gallant people of your country.
| dragontamer wrote:
| And the A10 is even lower-altitude than that.
|
| Welcome to the CAS role. You fly low and shoot cheap
| bullets (lots and lots of cheap bullets), but you're also
| vulnerable to ground fire.
|
| At least the AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect
| enemy missiles automatically. A10 basically has no form
| of defense. In any case, a CAS aircraft is in a position
| of higher risk than most other aircraft since it needs to
| travel low enough (and long-enough) on the front-lines.
|
| That doesn't mean that CAS is useless. It just means you
| need a _LOT_ of support before CAS is helpful. That's why
| an aircraft like F35 (which can perform SEAD / Wild
| Weasel, as well as CAS later in the war when the air-
| defenses go down) is better.
|
| Not to mention, F35 has stealth capabilities, so I'm not
| even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35 reliably.
| Stealth is more than just invisibility, its also one of
| the best layers of armor since missiles need a RADAR
| signature to hit airplanes these days.
|
| -----------
|
| But you're right. In the current Ukrainian war, there's
| almost no need for AC-130 or A10. Neither side has air
| superiority and both sides have incredible amounts of
| anti-air defenses. If anything, this is the war that
| shows why the F35 would be such an incredible aircraft.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > And the A10 is even lower-altitude than that.
|
| So the window where you are vulnerable to MANPAD operator
| is _less_ than of that AC-130.
|
| > Welcome to the CAS role. You ....
|
| Ah, yes, sorry, sir, looks like I need to take my
| Hazelnut Bianco Venti Latte and get out of your lawn,
| sir?
|
| > AC-130 has a ton of flares to misdirect enemy missiles
| automatically
|
| There is no ejection seats on AC-130. It would be never
| be operated where MANPADs are the norm.
|
| > A10 basically has no form of defense
|
| Oh ffs, A-10 is armoured with 15-40mm titanium plates,
| while AC-130 armoured with hopes and prayers.
|
| > so I'm not even sure if MANPADs can lock onto an F35
| reliably
|
| If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot)
| fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to
| MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane
| stealthiness.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot)
| fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to
| MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane
| stealthiness.
|
| *Multi-role* fighter. F35 has gun-pods and absolutely is
| expected to play some CAS role.
|
| Its not a dedicated CAS aircraft, no. Its not as good as
| other aircraft at the job (AC-130 has more loiter time,
| bigger guns, etc. etc.), but in a war you use what you
| can get your hands on.
|
| --------
|
| And suddenly talking about different weapons now that
| MANPADs are (probably) useless vs a Stealth Aircraft is
| the case-in-point of a multi-role fighter with multiple
| advanced capabilities.
|
| No weapon is immune to all weapons or defenses. But F35
| is immune to most missiles due to the nature of stealth.
| Stealth is the modern armor: if you can't be seen or
| can't be tracked, you can't be hit. I wouldn't say that
| F35 is ideal for gatling-gun strafe runs of enemies, but
| the fact remains that it _CAN_ do the job if forced
| (thanks to those configurable gunpods).
|
| IMO, the war on the ground being fought right now? A
| system that can kill enemy Helicopters, perform SEAD,
| stealth capabilities and even do CAS (albeit a crappy job
| at it but "can do the job") is so obviously useful to the
| Ukrainian war that its hard to take any counter-argument
| seriously.
|
| > If F-35 is at the MANPAD altitude then somebody (pilot)
| fucked greatly. F-35 in CAS role would never drop to
| MANPAD altitude and Shilka doesn't care about the plane
| stealthiness.
|
| What's the Shilka's RADAR-guided gun supposed to do
| against an airplane it can't even see? Are the operators
| expected to aim and shoot purely on optics?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > F35 has gun-pods and absolutely is expected to play
| some CAS role
|
| > in a war you use what you can get your hands on
|
| In a war you don't use a multi-billion toy for it's
| marketing qualities. Because this is the way lose your
| multi-billion toy.
|
| > MANPADs are (probably) useless
|
| Beam riders (eg Starstreak). And as soon as you are -lt
| 2km then you are in IR/UV/Image recognition danger zone
| too, because: low, fast, precise - choose two.
|
| > albeit a crappy job at
|
| *sigh*
|
| No. It can't do CAS with it's guns. It can do precision
| drops for CAS (which were done by F-16 against fortified
| and non-moving targets quite effectively) but it never
| would be deployed in A-10 style, because that would be
| the one step before the embarrassment of losing a modern
| stealth fighter to some MANPAD.
|
| > an airplane it can't even see
|
| At 5-7km? Are you _sure_ it can 't be seen at all at that
| distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing
| materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter.
| And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate
| of fire you can do this.
|
| > Are the operators expected to aim and shoot purely on
| optics?
|
| "but in a war you use what you can get your hands on"
| dragontamer wrote:
| > In a war you don't use a multi-billion toy for it's
| marketing qualities. Because this is the way lose your
| multi-billion toy.
|
| The most recent batch of F35A unit cost was $110 Million.
|
| I think you've got some severe misunderstandings about
| the nature of the F35 project. Its a multi-billion $$
| *research* project, but each airplane is much cheaper
| than that.
|
| > The F-35's price per unit, including ancillary costs
| like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and
| spare parts is $110.3 million per F-35A, $135.8 million
| per F-35B, and $117.3 million per F-35C.
|
| This airplane is designed to be mass produced well. The
| mass production / upfront engineering costs are massive,
| but the airplane itself is... ya know... an airplane.
|
| > No. It can't do CAS with it's guns.
|
| That's why the F35 has gun-*pods*. It can equip the pods
| and turn into a CAS fighter.
|
| The F35's ability to equip gunpods and perform a CAS role
| is well known. Its not very good at it and has all kinds
| of restrictions, but it is in fact a use-case that had
| some level of design thought go into.
|
| ------------
|
| > At 5-7km? Are you sure it can't be seen at all at that
| distance? It's a radar absorbing and a radar dispersing
| materials, not an invisibility cloak from Harry Potter.
| And yes, you can point it and spray-n-pray. With AAA rate
| of fire you can do this.
|
| Uh huh. https://media.cheggcdn.com/media/1fe/1fe5f562-7e8
| 4-4761-9bce...
|
| You know that bullets drop different heights given the
| distance to target, right? You can't just spray-and-pray
| at these distances, the difference between 5km and 5.5km
| is a lot of space that the "bullet drops".
|
| Ask _any_ hunter or marksman. They'll have tac-marks on
| their rifle for how high to aim even at 100m vs 300m
| shots. When you start dealing with much further out
| targets things get even worse, especially if you're
| "aiming up" and the ballistic trajectory of bullets
| starts to grow very complex.
|
| Doubly so when these aircraft are moving at 500mph+, so
| you need RADAR to calculate how far to lead the bullets.
| At 5km, an AA gun will take as long as 5 to 10 seconds
| before it reaches the target, so you need significant
| amounts of calculation on the Jet's direction-of-travel
| (and leading your shot) before you even have hopes of
| hitting it.
|
| Now yes, RADAR + Computers do the job well... against an
| A10 or otherwise aircraft devoid of stealth. If you blind
| the RADAR system and none of these computers work
| anymore, you pretty much have free reign and are nearly
| immune to bullets. You can't be tracked, you can't be
| calculated, you can't be hit.
|
| Hitting a 3D target maneuvering in the air is very
| difficult. That's why we built aimbot / Anti-air gun
| systems to calculate these things.
|
| All of those computers cease to function the minute the
| aircraft is stealth. If the computer doesn't know the
| distance, bearing, or velocity, it cannot compute and
| will not be able to hit the target.
|
| -------------------
|
| But that doesn't change the fact that you're playing
| "Batman utility belt" with these weapon systems. We
| started with MANPADs and now we're talking AA guns, but
| in either case the stealth-capability of F35 defeats both
| so it doesn't matter. Are you gonna pull any other weapon
| out of your bag of arguments? We're like 3 or 4 arguments
| through weapon systems that would have made the A10 fully
| irrelevant and you're still struggling to make a coherent
| case on what weapon would reliably hit an F35.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| From what I understand both sides have plenty of Buks but
| Russian ELINT and ECM has been remarkably inflexible
| outside of counter battery roles (besides some broad
| spectrum jamming earlier in the conflict)
| m0llusk wrote:
| There has been a great deal of honing to the jet and its
| production processes over time. The prototypes were
| overpriced and underperforming but with scale all that was
| overcome.
| belter wrote:
| Well at least in close combat we know who turns first: "F 16
| vs. F 35 - Turn Comparison" - https://youtu.be/SPqUvCnWcrk
| mrguyorama wrote:
| If you actually talk to pilots who have been in dogfights
| with F35s, they will tell you the radar-assisted guns
| basically could not properly target the F35 even at
| dogfighting range. It doesn't do a lot of good that, in
| order to fight the F35 you have to remember how aviation
| gunnery worked in 1944, before you had a computer doing
| most of the ballistics for you.
| slavboj wrote:
| The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close
| combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.
| belter wrote:
| A theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program, but
| quickly dismissed by the Ukrainian War.
|
| "Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very
| Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
| zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program
|
| Because F-35 operation manual, chapter 1, "Combat
| prerequisites":
|
| Lob anti-SAM missiles till the enemy wouldn't have any
| operational SAM, _then_ you can fly in on your fancy
| F-35.
|
| /s but only slightly
| dncornholio wrote:
| This is a video of a fighter plane launching 2 missiles.
| It doesn't dismiss anything.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just because the F-35 was designed to be a strike
| aircraft more than a dogfighter doesn't mean that it
| won't be put in those situations. We've been using butter
| knives as screwdrivers for as long as we've had a butter
| knife but no screwdriver.
| some_random wrote:
| That dogfight is newsworthy because it's exceptional, and
| even still it's not a turning duel by any stretch of the
| imagination. The real takeaway from the Ukrainian war is
| that stealth and engagement range are paramount.
| dgroshev wrote:
| ...plus SEAD/DEAD are incredibly important and (AFAIK)
| there is only one air force on the planet that
| systematically develops and deploys tech and trains for
| it.
| [deleted]
| xjlin0 wrote:
| F-4 Phantom was a great fighter serving US Navy, Marine
| and Air Force. It equipped with missiles to kill enemies
| in the beyond visual range, didn't equip internal guns in
| the first generation because "it shouldn't get into close
| combat" .....
| cityhall wrote:
| And the F-15's design slogan was "Not a pound for air to
| ground". Guess what it's being used for now?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Quite amusingly, Su-27 was an air superiority fighter at
| it's infancy.
| [deleted]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The F-15E Strike Eagle is a different, significantly
| heavier and higher payload was produced by a separate,
| later project abd competition from the original air-to-
| air F-15 (its competitor was thr F-16XL, which would have
| been the F-16E/F if selected.)
|
| And the F-15EX Eagle II is an even newer aircraft.
|
| The F-15C/D are still air-to-air fighters.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Same with the F-16, which started life as a skunkworks
| project that prioritized dogfighting but is today heavily
| used for close air support and bombing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| While the skunkworks project and even the initial
| government Lightweight Fighter project had an air-to-air
| dogfighting focus, the program under which the F-16
| development was conpleted and it was eventually purchased
| was for a multirole fighter, that wasn't a post-purchase
| usage evolution.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| The issue with the F4 wasn't the lack of a gun alone, and
| focusing on that aspect 50 years after the Vietnam war
| clouds the current state of things. The issue was that
| missile technology was in it's infancy and unreliable,
| coupled with US fighter pilot training focusing on
| interception of long-range Soviet nuclear bombers. The US
| never really envisioned a conventional war being possible
| in a post-nuclear world. Note that despite this, what the
| US deemed "inadequate" air dominance was still a roughly
| 4-1 air-to-air kill-ratio in their favour during the
| beginning-middle of the Vietnam War.
|
| Once pilot training changed to focus on fighters, the
| kill-ratio shot up to 15-1 for the last half-year or so
| of the war. The number of these kills made by F4s with
| guns was small compared to F4s with missiles (even given
| the unreliable state of the technology at the time), as
| you can see for yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /List_of_United_States_aerial...
|
| (Note that this is the case even in the later years of
| the war, when F4 mounted gun-pods were more common)
|
| The narrative of the Vietnam War that gun > long-range
| missile wasn't even true then. And certainly isn't so now
| that missile technology has matured. A quick glance over
| to modern air campaigns is proof. Beyond visual range
| missiles and long-range radar systems are king. There's
| nothing wrong with having a back-up close-range weapon
| (same reason why soldiers carry knives), but the use-case
| is niche, and we shouldn't be designing our fighters
| around this combat situation. The equivalent would be
| arguing that soldiers should carry broadswords, and using
| the handful of knife engagements as evidence to why edge-
| weapons are superior to guns.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| An additional problem F4 pilots had early in the war was
| the horrible Rules of Engagement they had to follow in
| hostile airspace. They were forced to get close to migs
| for ID _and_ observe hostile behavior.
|
| Naturally, by the time they accomplished that, they had
| thrown away all their advantages and handed the migs
| their disadvantages on a silver platter.
| dylan604 wrote:
| what in the world is that proving? it's 2 separate videos
| taken at totally different times. I'm not saying that the
| F35 is better than the F16 at turn radius, but this video
| is worthless as evidence of anything other than people are
| bad at tracking jets with a video camera.
| u10 wrote:
| First, there are very few aircraft that could beat an F-16
| in a rate fight, but the likelihood that 2 aircraft enter a
| merge are extremely low, and even if everything went wrong
| and two aircraft entered the merge the ability for modern
| missiles to fire absurd off-bore shots kind of negates the
| requirement to get nose on.
|
| You might point to the early days of the Ukrainian War as a
| sign that BCM is not dead but that wouldn't track these
| days. Russia is sitting with MiG-31's flying over Belarus
| and Western Russia firing extremely long rage missiles. The
| enviroment is simply not permissive enough for the type of
| aggressive CAP that might result in BCM.
| [deleted]
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think so far the F-35 has had 1 death and maybe half a dozen
| crashes in hundreds of thousands of hours of operation.
|
| Just from perusing the stats for other military planes that
| seems pretty good actually.
| SonicScrub wrote:
| The F-35 is cheaper than it's contemporaries, and has a lower
| accident rate.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Maybe you are thinking of _The Machine-Gunners_ [1]. I loved to
| watch the BBC adaption as a kid.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Gunners
| gadders wrote:
| I was thinking more The Nightmare Man [1]. Scared the
| absolute piss out of me as a kid and I don't think it was
| even on that late:
|
| https://ayearinthecountry.co.uk/the-nightmare-man-
| part-1-col...
| Hammerhead12321 wrote:
| Something to keep in mind that I do not believe anyone else has
| mentioned is that the F-35 was built in several variations to
| serve different branches of the military in roughly similar
| configurations. The Navy and Air Force can both successfully
| operate and maintain the aircraft as older planes are
| decommissioned, and eliminates the need for other aircraft to
| be developed to serve the specific use cases of the various
| branches of the U.S. military.
|
| It makes maintenance far easier and over the long run results
| in significantly reduced costs.
| leoh wrote:
| >Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how
| unreliable they seem to be.
|
| There are a number of possibilities you are not considering.
| Having our adversaries believe that the F35 is unreliable, for
| example, would be exceptionally useful. Other possibilities
| include intentionally attempting out-of-spec maneuvers or
| experimental hardware.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be
|
| The high price may cause them to be unreliable, because they
| are so expensive to operate they don't get enough flying time
| to work the bugs out.
| nradov wrote:
| The F-35 has a lower mishap rate and higher availability rate
| than most other tactical aircraft.
| jameshart wrote:
| You don't hear about the ones that don't crash.
|
| To determine that this crash is evidence of unreliability would
| require you to have detailed knowledge of the operational and
| training volume and tempo they're flying with - in comparison
| to other aircraft and their comparative failure rate.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| [dead]
| fnord77 wrote:
| I wonder how many people are going to lose their jobs over this
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I need a tanker truck of jet fuel and a copy of the movie FireFox
| from 1982.
|
| I'll be sharing a table with Jeff at the next gun show.
| https://joshdance.medium.com/who-is-jeff-and-why-does-he-hav...
|
| /s
| swader999 wrote:
| These things can carry nukes and we can lose them. Hmmmm.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| Not yet:
|
| https://theaviationist.com/2021/10/06/f-35-b61-12/
|
| Best you could hope for would be a test bomb over Nevada but
| with no nuclear components.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Very unlikely to be a broken arrow if they're asking for
| civilian assistance. Much more likely is it had blanks, went
| AWOL, and is lost in a lake.
| swader999 wrote:
| This time.
| [deleted]
| stuckinhell wrote:
| The USA really is in decline.
| 542458 wrote:
| I'm surprised that a crashing F-35 wouldn't generate enough fire
| and smoke to be easily detected.
| jl6 wrote:
| It sounds like they're looking in lakes. Could have gone splash
| without leaving much trace on the surface.
| josefresco wrote:
| Maybe not? This article references some examples of planes
| landing intact: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-
| zone/f-35-cant-be-found-aft...
| ikeashark wrote:
| Planes like the F-22 are inherently aerodynamically unstable
| because it allows then to be highly maneuverable, The
| stability of the aircraft is handled by the electronics. So
| back then planes of the that type would be able to just glide
| down and land but with a F-22 or any modern military jet, it
| wouldn't.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| It could fly until it finds ocean, runs out of fuel and then
| darts in. My god think of the bill.
| kashunstva wrote:
| If the plane is in trim (does the F35 even have manual trim?)
| and/or on autopilot, I can see a long glide to somewhere with
| a stable flight path, at least until the loss of thrust due
| to fuel exhaustion leads to an aerodynamic stall. But in of
| these circumstances, there would have been no need for the
| pilot to eject. Strange indeed.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I heard a story about an FA-18 where the pilot passed out,
| suffocated and died, and the jet just flew until it ran out
| gas and went down in the ocean.
|
| We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder
| what code is in the exception block for when the plane is
| working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and
| gently crash somewhere. It's more surprising it didn't have
| some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back
| mechanism. I certainly think that'll be on the Jira board
| next sprint.
| tivert wrote:
| > We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder
| what code is in the exception block for when the plane is
| working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and
| gently crash somewhere.
|
| I doubt there's an exception block for that. What if
| there's a fault and it triggers while the pilot is still
| in the plane?
|
| > It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone
| home, become a drone, style fall back mechanism. I
| certainly think that'll be on the Jira board next sprint.
|
| I doubt it. All of those ideas seem to have deal-breaker
| drawbacks in a military system. What if there's a fault
| and it "phones home" during a mission, breaking radio
| silence? What if an adversary figures out how to activate
| drone-mode, then hijacks and crashes the planes when they
| need to perform?
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has
| proved that in some ways the west is overestimating the
| capabilities of it's enemies.
| codedokode wrote:
| But the West also underestimates, for example, cheap
| Iranian drones that can be easily mass produced and cost
| much less than the missiles to shoot them down.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > But the West also underestimates, for example, cheap
| Iranian drones that can be easily mass produced and cost
| much less than the missiles to shoot them down.
|
| No, it doesn't. It failed to anticipate the large-scale
| transfer of Iranian loitering munitions to Russia for use
| in that role, it didn't underestimate their utility. And
| once they started showing up, the West started supplying
| more cost effective countermeasures, like the Gepard,
| which use autocannons rather than missiles.
| dgroshev wrote:
| The West does not. Major R&D effort went into laser based
| SHORAD that is basically free to fire, with units being
| already deployed. Besides that, good old C-RAM would take
| those out no problem.
| tivert wrote:
| > I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has
| proved that in some ways the west is overestimating the
| capabilities of it's enemies.
|
| That attitude is a recipe for overconfidence and failure,
| and is probably the biggest reason for _Russia 's_ poor
| showing in Ukraine.
|
| Also, from what I've read, electronic warfare is one of
| the areas where the Russians have shown strong
| capability. It's a mistake to misinterpret "sucks at some
| things" as "sucks at _all_ things. "
|
| Remember too that significant amounts detailed technical
| data for the F-35 have been stolen:
|
| https://thediplomat.com/2015/01/new-snowden-documents-
| reveal...:
|
| > Last week, Der Spiegel published a new tranche of
| documents provided to the German weekly magazine by the
| former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward
| Snowden. The documents are the first public confirmation
| that Chinese hackers have been able to extrapolate top
| secret data on the F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter
| jet. According to sources, the data breach already took
| place in 2007 at the prime subcontractor Lockheed Martin.
| A U.S. government official recently claimed that as of
| now, "classified F-35 information is protected and
| remains secure."
|
| > ...
|
| > The Snowden files outline the scope of Chinese F-35
| espionage efforts, which focused on acquiring the radar
| design (the number and types of modules), detailed engine
| schematics (methods for cooling gases, leading and
| trailing edge treatments, and aft deck heating contour
| maps) among other things. The document claims that many
| terabytes of data specific to the F-35 joint strike
| fighter program were stolen.
|
| When designing military aircraft, it makes sense to
| reduce attack surface and avoid implementing exploitable
| features to address unusual scenarios.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| WRT to Ukraine, it's a mistake to think that competence
| at EW and incompetence at land warfare balance each other
| out when the fight is primarily land warfare. And you
| need to be better at the land warfare to win.
|
| Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote
| control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really
| big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing
| attack surface. But the JSF is a hub of interconnected
| technology it's not unreasonable to think they don't have
| a software package for all sorts of remote options.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote
| control.
|
| AFAIK, that is all misreporting the (also abandoned) idea
| of an bomber drone companion aircraft and/or speculation
| about a potential future application of its modular
| upgradability.
|
| > But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's
| not unreasonable to think they don't have a software
| package for all sorts of remote options.
|
| I agree that its not unreasonable to think that they _don
| 't_ have that.
| tivert wrote:
| > WRT to Ukraine, it's a mistake to think that competence
| at EW and incompetence at land warfare balance each other
| out when the fight is primarily land warfare. And you
| need to be better at the land warfare to win.
|
| That's not what I said or meant.
|
| What I'm saying is: it's stupid to design something for
| an adversarial situation like war, under the assumption
| that your adversary will be incompetent and unskilled.
| You seemed to be inferring that US adversaries would be
| incompetent at EW, because Russia's competence at land
| warfare has been far less than was previously assumed,
| and I don't think that follows at all.
|
| > Also, the B21 is reported to be designed for remote
| control. And that's the sort of thing you put the really
| big weapons on. I understand the idea behind reducing
| attack surface.
|
| If a military jet will not regularly remotely operated,
| it makes total sense to not implement remote operation
| features at all. Adding the feature introduces unneeded
| risk, as well as development cost and weight.
|
| And (IMHO) if you do add a remote operation feature
| (because you think you'll use it), _it should be locked
| behind a physical shutoff_ , so it _cannot_ be
| adversarially-activated when it 's not wanted. That would
| mean it would likely be of little use in a case like
| this.
|
| > But the JSF is a hub of interconnected technology it's
| not unreasonable to think they don't have a software
| package for all sorts of remote options.
|
| I don't see how it as all reasonable to think they've
| developed such a feature without any kind of evidence.
| The only hits I get trying to find information were for
| scale-model RC planes, stuff about F-35 pilots
| controlling drones, and this speculative article from a
| likely non-reputable website
| (https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/09/16/american-
| stealth-f-...) which outlines extensive modifications
| required and ultimately concludes such a thing would be a
| bad idea.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has
| proved that in some ways it is far more catastrophic to
| underestimate your enemies than to overestimate them.
| giarc wrote:
| It's the most advanced plane the military has. You would
| think that an eject would trigger some additional
| communications or allow remote control of the jet.
| _moof wrote:
| Pilots don't eject from controllable aircraft. If the
| pilot ejected, remote control won't help.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "Remote control of jet" comes with fairly obvious
| adversarial risks the military likely wishes to avoid.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Drones?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| We've had this trouble with them, yes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-U.S._RQ-170_incident
|
| No one wants to lose a B-2 or F-22 this way.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no remote control of manned tactical aircraft.
| That was never a requirement.
|
| The jet may have been transmitting it's position via
| civilian ADS-B or military data link. But those systems
| could have been switched off, or malfunctioned during the
| mishap.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| If it flew until it ran out of fuel and then crashed the amount
| of fire and smoke would be significantly reduced.
| tehf0x wrote:
| So a similar thing happened near some friends' in France. A
| military jet crashed into the forest near their house, but the
| air force couldn't figure out where it had gone. Eventually a
| farmer noticed that a new pond had appeared on his land. The jet
| made enough of a crater when crashing that drained the nearby
| swamp and created a new pond deep enough to conceal the full
| fuselage, thus completely hiding the airplane. Once the farmer
| alerted the air force, they were able to crane the remains out of
| the newly formed pond and recover the key parts of hardware
| onboard. Had the farmer not noticed the change in landscape they
| might have never found it. https://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-
| actu/2011/03/02/97001-20110302...
| dheera wrote:
| Why don't these aircraft get 10Hz GPS updates and send them to
| StarLink as they are going down? It's 2023 already.
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, for the plane in the parent comment's article, that
| reason is likely because the design for that plane was
| started in 1972.
| [deleted]
| mortureb wrote:
| But why? Don't these billion dollar machines have a GPS tracker
| on them?
| Aloha wrote:
| GPS is not reliable underwater, I'd expect it to have an
| ELT/EPIRB but those don't work with GPS as far as I know, and
| the crash could have been hard enough to render it
| inoperable.
| jpadkins wrote:
| I don't think stealth aircrafts normally have trackers or
| anything broadcasting a signal. Kind of defeats the
| purpose...
|
| I did read that stealth aircraft have transponders installed
| when operating in US airspace, so commercial radar can see
| them better. But it was not installed on this flight.
| _djo_ wrote:
| They're always installed, just selectively disabled as
| needed.
| kube-system wrote:
| They have transponders. But military airplanes can and
| sometimes do turn them off. When airplanes broadcast signals
| they can be detected. The military sometimes wishes to avoid
| this.
| _djo_ wrote:
| They have transponders that transmit their identity and
| location on the most modern, but those depend on being active
| (for some reason the one in the F-35 was not) and on there
| being receivers nearby to pick them up. At lower altitudes in
| remote locations coverage is spotty.
|
| So it's not a guarantee.
| mortureb wrote:
| Why would an AirTag not work in this scenario? I'm guessing
| it would be a security risk?
| _djo_ wrote:
| First, yes it would be a security risk. Second, AirTags
| depend on there being a set number of iOS devices nearby
| to provide location data and an internet connection.
| You're not going to get that in a rural area.
| oynqr wrote:
| Turn your stealth fighter into a regular one with just
| $30!
| Rygian wrote:
| It's relevant to note that the aircraft disappeared from radar
| in the evening while doing "low altitude exercises" and was
| discovered the next morning (bad weather preventing the rescue
| teams from finding it earlier).
|
| The linked article mentions that the pilot and navigator were
| considered missing. Other news reported also the presence of
| human remains near the crash site.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wonder if some of the "autopilot" functionality for military
| aircraft is to swan-dive into water/forest if everyone has
| already ejected.
|
| If it's going to crash (and can't autoland, which it probably
| shouldn't attempt even if it could if something ejection-worthy
| happened), might as well obliterate the thing in a safe place.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I doubt it. You do not want an uncommanded activation of that
| system for any reason. You may actually _want_ your disabled
| plane to continue in a specific direction for tactical
| reasons. You generally do not allow auto pilot to make large
| deflections in control surfaces, as you always want a pilot
| on the stick to be able to overcome any uncommanded autopilot
| actions.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Some Hollywood points in this direction. E.g. the Behind
| Enemy Lines ejection scene.
|
| Seems like a pretty good idea to self-destruct the most
| sensitive hardware (computers/chips/storage modules/etc) if
| recovery of the aircraft is no longer feasible.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| > self-destruct
|
| Ooh, yeah. Let's add even _more_ failure modes!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| For drones it makes sense. Drones could boot up with all
| config in RAM so as to be completely devoid of mission
| parameters once power is cut.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| The thing you're thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is
| capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory
| away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent
| people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always
| top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for
| multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without
| ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were
| steering away from populated areas)
|
| By the time a pilot ejects they've exhausted EVERY other
| option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain
| control at that point.
| viscanti wrote:
| > By the time a pilot ejects they've exhausted EVERY other
| option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain
| control at that point.
|
| It seems like they probably bail out when they've exhausted
| every option of being able to land it and survive. There
| are likely some scenarios where there's limited controls
| remaining, that wouldn't provide high enough odds of
| guaranteeing someone's survival, but that could optimize
| for something when it eventually makes contact with the
| land. In fact, it seems like there could be quite a bit of
| capabilities between where someone would want to bail out
| and where there are zero remaining controls.
| orange_fritter wrote:
| In flight school lore, during a training exercise, a
| plane righted itself from "uncontrollable flat spin"
| after ejection. Basically, pilot input can fight against
| the natural stability of the plane's design.
|
| Also:
|
| > During a training mission from Malmstrom Air Force
| Base, on Feb. 2, 1970, his F-106 entered an
| uncontrollable flat spin forcing him to eject.
| Unexpectedly, the aircraft recovered on its own and made
| a gentle belly landing and skidding for a few hundred
| yards on a field near Big Sandy, Montana, covered by some
| inches of snow.
|
| https://theaviationist.com/2013/10/24/cornfield-bomber/
| histriosum wrote:
| Worth noting that spin recovery is highly CG (center of
| gravity) dependent. Ejecting from an aircraft would
| significantly alter the CG. It's far more likely that the
| CG change broke the spin than the pilot was doing
| something unhelpful.
|
| Additionally there would be a nose down moment from the
| seat firing (newtons third law) and that may well have
| broken the stall.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I live in the real world, and there are incident reports
| that go into great detail about every aircraft loss. I've
| read every one since 1999, and I've never seen an
| incident where the pilot ejected over a populated area in
| an aircraft that was still controlled.
|
| What you all are imagining does not happen, and the odds
| of it happening are vanishingly small.
| ciscoriordan wrote:
| https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russian-
| su-34-fullback...
|
| "The statement went on to add that the crash was caused
| by an issue with one of the engines during takeoff, but
| the jet's two crewmembers are said to have ejected safely
| and survived. The extent of the injuries to the apartment
| building's tenants as well as civilians in the
| surrounding area is unknown at present."
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| "To the last I struggled to lift the plane, [but] copilot
| Yuriy Yegorov hit the catapult [triggering ejection] and
| we two ejected with our seats."
| cameldrv wrote:
| Have you looked at the MiG-23 that crashed last month in
| Michigan?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-
| repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G...
|
| This one? Which reads as though the back-seater (not the
| pilot) was the one that ejected and took the pilot with
| him?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| What invalidates none of the gain from the OP's idea.
|
| And in fact, if it's reliable, it can help saving pilots
| lives.
| ZeroCooly wrote:
| I think it's worth noting that that the MiG-23 that
| crashed in Michigan was a privately owned aircraft, flown
| not by an active service member. I highly doubt the
| military allows their pilots to eject without absolute
| certainty that the multimillion/billion dollar aircraft
| is totally lost.
|
| Additionally, I highly doubt there are many privately
| owned military jets equipped with ejection seats that are
| allowed to fly, especially in residential airspace.
|
| Also, as someone who works on FMS's the likelihood that a
| military program would spend the money required to code
| an AT/AP to have that capability is just too close to
| zero.
| thrill wrote:
| "I highly doubt the military allows their pilots to eject
| without absolute certainty that the multimillion/billion
| dollar aircraft is totally lost."
|
| Military pilots most assuredly do not seek permission to
| eject. Given time they may indeed seek advice about the
| likelihood of a good landing.
| lsh123 wrote:
| Interview with the guy who pulled the ejection cord in
| the Michigan Mig-23:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ftcn3NwAZCI
|
| tldr; they were out of airspeed and out of altitude
| barely within ejection envelope (i.e. exhausted all the
| options)
| chinathrow wrote:
| Depending on the situation, there might be not enough room
| or time to save lives in ground.
|
| Sample dual ejection:
|
| https://youtu.be/zN_Zl64OQEw?si=5Nk-LGBFxf4pmEDr
| tg16 wrote:
| Not really, sometimes a plane will land itself even after
| the pilot ejects.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
| lsh123 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Belgium_MiG-23_crash
| MarkMarine wrote:
| If you read that Wikipedia page, it's pretty clear the
| plane would have not recovered without the change in nose
| attitude from the ejection.
| gowld wrote:
| Which contradicts your original claim that "no AI is
| going to regain control at that point."
| mrb wrote:
| What Scoundreller meant is that if most of the controls are
| lost, then the few controls remaining could still be used
| to intentionally destroy the plane as much as possible. For
| example, the elevator (to control the pitch) might be the
| last working control, and it could be used to intentionally
| nosedive the plane after ejection.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| I don't think that solves anything. With critical secret
| pieces of hardware you will still want confirmation that
| they were destroyed or recover them. So even if the plane
| can attempt to self-destruct as much as possible, the
| military is still going to want to confirm the result.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I got that and I was trying to answer in the least
| sarcastic way I could. I'll try again.
|
| Autopilot isn't an all knowing AI that is better at
| dealing with emergency than a pilot. In the region of
| flight that involves a pilot ejection, especially in a
| plane like the F-35, the "autopilot" that would be
| created that could successfully scout a target area that
| was safe to crash in, eject the pilot, then somehow move
| the plane to that area with the canopy off the plane and
| the degradation of control that would involve, plus the
| million issues that could have caused the ejection in the
| first place... it's not plausible to create this and
| still have a pilot. You're talking about a system that is
| a better aviator, with more SA and more detail about
| aircraft systems than the human at the stick.
|
| So, first, I don't think we're there with AI that is
| better than the pilot in this region of flight, second,
| to make that would be so expensive as to be ridiculous,
| for the incredibly rare event that a military plane needs
| to eject over a populated area yet also has a safe area
| like a body of water to crash into. Third, making that
| system would negate the need for a pilot in the first
| place so again, what's the point?
|
| I get the thought, but it's silly.
| mrb wrote:
| I was not thinking of some highly advanced AI, just
| something ultra simple like: after ejection, attempt to
| pitch the plane to nosedive as vertically as possible.
| The intent being to to crash the airplane as badly as
| possible to prevent the enemy from recovering anything
| useful from the crash site.
| juancb wrote:
| Modern ejection systems are zero-zero systems designed to
| allow ejection at zero speed and zero altitude which
| means that the aircraft may not have enough energy to
| successfuly destroy sensitive components across the full
| ejection envelope.
|
| Why not rig it with explosives around the sensitive
| components and avoid the messy endeavor of trying to
| orient the plane for maximum destruction after ejection
| when that is likely to be unreliable at best?
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Sounds like a good way to destroy your own runway,
| barracks near the runway, etc.
| grogenaut wrote:
| to add
|
| 4 - if you had control with some badass AI why not land
| the plane safely for a recovery... the example in both
| the OP and the GP are planes lost in the country they are
| from not in enemy territory. The planes are not cheap...
| why would you purposefully wreck it in in a safe
| location.
| [deleted]
| MarkMarine wrote:
| EXACTLY
| mrb wrote:
| Actually my example assumed being in enemy territory.
| Nosedive the airplane for maximum destruction, to prevent
| the enemy from recovering anything useful from the crash
| site.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| What do you think they'll get? China already hacked in
| and grabbed the full design docs for the F-35. They have
| a stealth clone of it.
| to11mtm wrote:
| > Autopilot isn't an all knowing AI that is better at
| dealing with emergency than a pilot.
|
| b...bu... but all the twitter influencers told me... /s
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Actually, no. A pilot might punch from a perfectly flyable
| aircraft that ran out of fuel and can't be glided in due to
| terrain. Or a plane that has no propulsion for other
| reasons. They might even punch from a plane with some fuel
| but damage that precludes landing--if they're over
| civilization they might point it into nowhere and punch so
| they come down over civilization.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Ok, and here we go with the armchair aviators. Time in a
| Microsoft flight simulator doesn't give you expertise.
|
| I'll just reiterate, by the time a pilot is ejecting from
| the aircraft, everything has been done. Read through the
| incident reports and find me an incident where this
| wasn't done, cite it please. I can't find one.
|
| https://www.airandspaceforces.com/docs/type/accident/
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| I mean, are there detailed accident reports for the sort
| of military plane with "keep it away from the enemy" type
| equipment onboard? Seems like you wouldn't want to give
| away information about crash behavior since that could
| help the enemy recover the equipment.
|
| Not saying it is plausible or not in the first place, I
| have no idea, but I don't see how a lack of published
| reports of this happening in the real world proves
| anything.
| mcguire wrote:
| The key point is that the plane does not crash in a
| populated area (and secondarily that a military plane is
| destroyed if crashing in an area not controlled by the
| owner); in both of your examples, the pilot routinely
| does the first if not necessarily the second.
| Tommstein wrote:
| > By the time a pilot ejects they've exhausted EVERY other
| option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain
| control at that point.
|
| See, you say that, but this one seems to have done a good
| job of flying off to who the fuck knows where after the
| pilot ejected.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| And could potentially still be flying.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| I think the failures leading up to ejection preclude any kind
| of automated flight control afterward. Seeing how modern
| aircraft are all fly by wire.
| ozim wrote:
| Well usually it is pilots responsibility to try to aim it in
| safe direction as much as possible and only then eject.
| Basically like captain on the ship you don't eject but you
| are last one to leave the ship after you made what is
| possible to save others from harm (unless they are of course
| hostile forces).
|
| I think quite some pilots died this way because they were
| trying to the last second to save other lives.
|
| If plane is that much out of control that you cannot do much,
| adding some code to try to do something might make things
| actually worse from my perspective.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup, plenty of stories of pilots going in with the plane
| because they were guiding it away from people on the
| ground. That's why modern ejection seats can save you even
| if you're at ground level (although you do have to be
| upright in that case.) It lets the pilot ride it as long as
| possible and yet escape.
| andromaton wrote:
| Including Gagarin
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Just like Luke's X-Wing on Dagobah!
| ustad wrote:
| Reminds me of the movie The Pentagon Wars.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars
| hn8305823 wrote:
| Am I the only one shocked that it's stealth was effective enough
| that they couldn't track it even with a malfunctioning
| transponder?
| AustinDev wrote:
| Not in the slightest bit.
| lambersley wrote:
| $1.2T to OPERATE the F-35 program, yikes! I would love to see the
| TCO figures on an F-35 (or not). US Military budget concepts have
| always blown my mind.
| yabones wrote:
| Not to say $1.2T is nothing, but that's over the lifespan of
| the program. It's like if you paid for your car plus all the
| fuel, oil changes, spare parts, tires, car wash, toll roads,
| all up front.
|
| > $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more
| than 60 years.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Holy cow, 60 years is the _design_ life of the F35?! We will
| somehow still be operating these things in 2150!
| Invictus0 wrote:
| F16's 50th anniversary is next year. They're still being
| flown by many countries around the world, including the US,
| and will soon be fighting in Ukraine.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I believe the U-6A Beaver is the oldest design still
| operated by the US military.
|
| Initial design was 1947, still being used as tow planes
| for gliders in the Navy.
| dralley wrote:
| That feels a bit like cheating. B-52 is nearly as old and
| is legitimately widely used.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Headlines kick harder when you leave out divisors.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| Earlier discussion over here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37552740
| expertentipp wrote:
| [flagged]
| brettermeier wrote:
| Where are the parallels? I don't see them...
| expertentipp wrote:
| They operate in real time Reapers on the other side of the
| globe, have constellations of all kinds of satellites, they
| know from my iphone that my parents have just visited, yet
| state of the art F-35 "disappeared"?
| thebutcher wrote:
| [dead]
| SanderNL wrote:
| Sometimes it's hard to just accept reality: even the big,
| mighty and omnipresent supernatural and all-knowing
| Government(tm) is just a bunch of non-magical, non-demonic
| regular folks trying to keep things on the rails. It
| usually works out OK, but there's a lot of rails and a lot
| of stuff to keep on them.
| Zetobal wrote:
| Gibt bestimmt ne DIN Norm fur...
| expertentipp wrote:
| Don't speak Spanish, sorry.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| By reports this is one of the F35B variants, a VTOL capable jet.
| Like the V-22 Osprey, it is pushing mechanical complexity maybe
| too far and has been a program rife with troubles. Compared to
| the F35B, the normal variants have been essentially trouble free.
|
| Trying to make a whole mechanical system to redirect 40500lbs of
| thrust isn't super reliable.
|
| There is some sort of lesson there that applies to the software
| engineering realm.
|
| EDIT: Ooof, looks like there are some VTOL fanatics in the house.
| Who knew that unreliable military hardware was a fetish.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Military intelligence really is an oxymoron.
| belter wrote:
| If you happen to find it report here:
| https://twitter.com/TeamCharleston/status/170352338547553496...
|
| Please no jokes about losing a stealth fighter...
| hef19898 wrote:
| Aren't those F-39s invisible anyway?
| belter wrote:
| We are looking for an F-35...You were _not_ supposed to
| disclose the existance of the F-39 ;-)
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| F-35 > F-39 # true
| bombcar wrote:
| I'm wondering where they get the keyboards for these; I
| have a IBM terminal keyboard and it only goes up to F-24.
| xattt wrote:
| You joke, but some people are still searching for the
| "Any" key.
| belter wrote:
| It's close to the Windows key: https://upload.wikimedia.o
| rg/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Keyboard...
| turnsout wrote:
| After the development of the F-35, the idea that the US
| government could fund and develop a new fighter without the
| public knowing is somehow heartwarming!
| hef19898 wrote:
| Well, the F-117 was developed in complete secrecy. And,
| I'd like to add, in busget and on time. All that using a
| bunch of stuff coming from the F-15 and F-16 programs. My
| pet theory is, that those twonhad a ton of cost overruns
| regarding spares and such because avionics and engines
| for the F-117 had to be sourced somehow.
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah... that was the 70s though.
| pbak wrote:
| "Yuri, you lost another submarine ... ?"
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Well they still missing an atom bomb from 1958 dropped by a B47
| bomber near Tybee island Georgia.
| polynomial wrote:
| Wait, whaat?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-
| air_coll...
|
| It's not the only missing nuke, either.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Mars_Bluff_B-47_nuclear_w.
| .. is probably the (darkly) funniest one in the list. That
| one was recovered, but "the Air Force tried to nuke my kids'
| play house" is a story not many people can tell.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| Fortunately, the fissile nuclear core was stored elsewhere
| on the aircraft
|
| While I'll admit that is very effective failsafe, did they
| actually require the crew to do bomb surgery with a demon
| core during flight if they needed to arm the device?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yeah, the early ones were designed to be armed in-flight.
|
| https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/mk6.htm
|
| > This weapon was a capsule bomb, meaning that the
| nuclear material for the bomb was kept in a special
| capsule separate from the rest of the device for safety's
| sake. Just before the bomb was to be dropped from the
| delivery aircraft the capsule was inserted into the bomb
| casing and the weapon became armed. It was also the first
| atomic weapon to offer the delivery aircraft's bombardier
| the option of changing the detonation altitude while the
| bomber was in flight to the target.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Veritasium just did a video on this.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgSesWMUEI
| m000 wrote:
| Definitely a SPECTRE operation.
| hoseja wrote:
| Why don't they fly with transponders on during training,
| precisely for this reason?
| null0ranje wrote:
| It was inop at the time:
|
| "The jet's transponder, which usually helps locate the
| aircraft, was not working "for some reason that we haven't yet
| determined," said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base
| Charleston. "So that's why we put out the public request for
| help."
| hoseja wrote:
| Thanks, haven't yet read the article through when I
| commented, stupid of me.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh, someone sure is going to have to answer some tough
| questions. If not in purely military airspace, or combat
| operations, military aircraft have to be airworthy according
| to civil standards.
|
| That being said, no casualties, loosing a stealth fighter is
| somewhat funny.
| mwint wrote:
| If it was a two-ship, could have been only the lead had
| their transponder on. Keeps the ATC traffic alert systems a
| little happier.
| jononomo wrote:
| As another commenter has noted, this confirms that the stealth
| capabilities of this fighter jet are truly magnificent.
| Slackwise wrote:
| Wow, the Warthunder forum arguments are getting _way_ out of hand
| genpfault wrote:
| > Warthunder forum arguments
|
| Context: [1]
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Thunder#Documents_leaks
| tester756 wrote:
| >In January 2023, Raytheon denied media reports that security
| clearance background checks for jobs at the defense
| contractor investigate whether applicants play War Thunder.
|
| wtf
| some_random wrote:
| A redditor lied on the internet and a bunch of second and
| third rate media sites parroted it, this is why we can't
| have nice things
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Warthunder/comments/10kqto9/ahoy/
| solardev wrote:
| Guess the stealth is working.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Hand over as much intel to 4chan as possible and watch them find
| this thing in a matter of hours...
| motohagiography wrote:
| Came here to say that. Thinking topographic maps of the region
| for higher probability impacts, wind direction maps, air
| quality data, last known trajectory, shodan cameras, cell tower
| signal interference blips, RF noise from surviving electronics
| or beacons. Not a lot to go on though.
| tsavo wrote:
| And don't forget current fuel load to estimate radius of
| search area.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| It may be naive to ask this but... can I get a tail number? I'm
| not 100% sure these would have one I could look up on flightradar
| but a national post asking people to help find their plane would
| be way more useful with a little more info about the actual
| aircraft. We know it was "Sunday afternoon" over South Carolina
| somewhere but if we had some "last known location" info or
| something this might be solvable with some math estimates.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| With all due respect, I would hope that anything you could do
| with ADSB-out data is something that the US military has
| already tried.
| gl-prod wrote:
| US military: Yeah, right, we definitely tried that
|
| (Goes to check ADSB-out data)
| chankstein38 wrote:
| That's my assumption as well but I'd have assumed that'd be
| the case with basically anything except on-site search
| parties (though I'd hope they could do that as well haha).
| I'm with you though!
| ortusdux wrote:
| From the article -
|
| "The jet's transponder, which usually helps locate the
| aircraft, was not working "for some reason that we haven't
| yet determined," said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint
| Base Charleston. "So that's why we put out the public
| request for help."
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Unfortunately, no one had installed FindMyPlane
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The answer has been found!
|
| It crashed into a secret US Navy project: the Stealth Aircraft
| Carrier.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| This sounds too ridiculous to be true.
|
| I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a gambit to flush out
| an intelligence leak rather than an inability to find their own
| $160M plane.
| OscarTheGrinch wrote:
| My jet-plane brings all the spys to the yard.
| jsbisviewtiful wrote:
| You'd be surprised to learn then that the United States has
| lost several (6, last I knew) nuclear weapons over the decades.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear.
| ..
|
| > The US Department of Defense has officially recognized at
| least 32 "Broken Arrow" incidents from 1950 to 1980.
|
| https://www-
| tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/filer_p...
|
| > Unofficially, the Defense Atomic Support Agency (now known
| as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)) has detailed
| hundreds of "Broken Arrow" incidents.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear.
| .. ("Broken Arrow refers to an accidental event that involves
| nuclear weapons, warheads or components that does not create
| a risk of nuclear war.")
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Entirely credible. Right at the top it says it's a stealth
| aircraft. It's just doing what it does best.
| delfinom wrote:
| [flagged]
| NavinF wrote:
| We don't have children starving in schools
| woodruffw wrote:
| As of 2021, roughly 1 in 8 children in the US experience
| food insecurity[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-
| america/child-hunge...
| ensignavenger wrote:
| "food insecurity" is not the same as starving.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'll be sure to let the kids know!
| kkielhofner wrote:
| You would probably have a different perspective if you
| were in that situation, especially as a child.
|
| EDIT: Downvotes for compassion, HN is rough today!
| ensignavenger wrote:
| I grew up in a household that would qualify. I know
| exactly how I feel about it having experienced it as a
| child.
| anon____ wrote:
| If 1 in 8 kids experiences food insecurity, then it's
| likely that there are at least some, maybe 1 in 100, who
| are starving, however you define it.
|
| Also, there are two kinds of starvation: in one case the
| _quantity_ of food is insufficient, in the other its
| _quality_ is. Eating fries with soda in great quantity
| every day could still starve a growing kid.
| safety1st wrote:
| I was wondering how 1 in 8 children could be experiencing
| food insecurity in a nation with a 40% obesity rate, and
| what food insecurity was exactly, so I poked around in
| their methodology a little.
|
| https://www.feedingamerica.org/sites/default/files/2022-0
| 8/M...
|
| Happy to be corrected if I'm misreading this. But if I
| understand correctly, they go into it on page 8, and
| there are basically two ways they calculate food
| insecurity.
|
| The first is a weighted average of variables that are
| unrelated or indirectly related to food - including
| income, race and disability rate.
|
| The second is self-reporting (basically asking households
| if they need more money for food).
|
| Hmm.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I've seen this before, you end up with a bunch of
| overweight households reporting that it's too expensive
| to maintain a 4500 calorie a day diet.
| larkost wrote:
| My kids go to a school where the majority of the kids are
| somewhere around poverty level (easy to be under there in
| Silicon Valley if you are not an engineer in tech).
|
| I absolutely believe the administrators when they say
| that the meals some of the kids get in school might be
| the only ones they get for the day (by far not the
| majority: those are hard working parents, dedicated to
| their kids). And watching how much hand-holding is needed
| for some of the families on the pre-school-year paperwork
| day (back to school night) I am fully convinced that the
| worst-off kids are likely to wind up without food if
| their receiving it depends on their parents filling out
| forms.
|
| And I want to be clear that the kids I think might be on
| the edge are not (in most cases) there because of
| neglect. They are there because living here is more
| expensive than their parents can afford completely,
| despite working long hours. That is a condemnation of a
| society that mis-appropriates the wealth (like on
| Engineers like me).
|
| Yes, it is a waste of money that my kids (kids of a
| Silicon Valley Engineer) get their food for free, but
| looking at the alternative (kids going hungry), is it
| really that much of a waste?
| nradov wrote:
| I support free school lunch programs; no child should go
| hungry. But in California at least, many of the families
| with children who struggle with food insecurity entered
| the country illegally or with dubious claims of refugee
| status. That is a broader societal issue that can't be
| addressed through school funding or wealth
| redistribution.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Sure but they still need to eat.
| habinero wrote:
| Citation needed. We have a lot of homegrown poverty here.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| It's paradoxical.
|
| Historically wealthy and high status people were "fatter"
| and had pale skin. It signaled that you had ready access
| to food and didn't work outside.
|
| Now high status people are thin/muscular and have tanner
| skin - cheap and quick food is terrible for you and it
| signals you have the time to workout, pay for a
| trainer/gym membership, go on vacation to sunny
| destinations, aren't chained to a desk/working retail,
| can pay for and have access to high quality and fresh
| foods, etc.
|
| More and more high quality and healthy food is expensive
| and/or requires more time to prepare and plan. If you're
| shuffling between multiple minimum wage jobs you're often
| eating fast food all day because you either can't afford
| or don't have time for anything better.
|
| Then start looking at food deserts[0]. Stop at a bodega
| in a poor neighborhood that serves as the only food
| source around and prepare to be shocked at the absolute
| garbage they have available that's still covered by SNAP.
|
| [0] - https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-
| deserts
| macintux wrote:
| It's not pretty right now.
| https://www.npr.org/sections/health-
| shots/2023/05/03/1173535...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The problem that the US has is that calories are too
| cheap. Look at the class demographics of obesity. It's
| pretty clear no one is starving.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| blanket free lunch is disgustingly wasteful and a
| terrible solution for needy children. It is like buying a
| new car whenever you have a flat tire.
|
| I can feed my own kids, I don't need them picking up an
| extra slice of pizza every day for fun and throwing milk
| and plates and disposable utensils in the garbage. Ask
| any lunch worker about the additional garbage and waste
| it generates.
|
| The correct solution is to remove the barriers stopping
| children from getting free lunch- stop requiring parents
| to sign up for it. If a lunch aide feels like a kid needs
| food, they should be able to sign them up without anyone
| having to know about it or consent to it. Let the schools
| give kids in need double lunches if they want them and/or
| something to take home with them. Double down on the kids
| in need, don't force it on everyone.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Are there any stats/citations that back up your assertion
| that kids who bring their own lunches in universal free
| lunch states are wasting food en masse?
|
| > a terrible solution for needy children
|
| The kids who previously weren't getting fed are now
| getting fed, aren't they?
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| The tire got replaced too. Who cares if we are killing
| the environment because of lazy policymakers right?
| RankingMember wrote:
| I don't understand what you're saying here.
| dmd wrote:
| > a lunch aide feels like a kid needs food
|
| Giving random overworked, often bigoted people the power
| to let a kid eat or not? What could possibly go wrong?!
| kube-system wrote:
| There should never be any judgement regarding a child's
| financial situation during the school day.
|
| The place where I grew up handled this in the best
| possible way: Every kid got a lunch if they went through
| the lunch line, without exception. The school system
| simply kept track of which students got a meal, and at
| the end of the month, they'd either mail a bill or it
| would be covered through the free lunch program.
|
| Under this system, there was no opportunity for students
| or staff to pass judgement on students for their
| financial situation.
| 1234letshaveatw wrote:
| the issue here is that how is it determined who is
| eligible for the free lunch program after the fact? The
| parents are too negligent to sign up, their account goes
| into arrears and the kid ends up skipping the line out of
| fear getting punished for it. Parents have to sign up and
| too many don't give a crap
| kube-system wrote:
| > and the kid ends up skipping the line out of fear
| getting punished for it.
|
| No, as I said above, every kid got a lunch _without
| exception_. The record keeping was unidirectional. The
| lunch line tallied the quantity of lunches that were
| handed out to each student and reported this to the
| district, but the district did not report back anything
| about paying bills to anyone at the school. Nobody in the
| lunch room knew anything about the finances of any
| student. They were tasked only with handing out lunches.
|
| > Parents have to sign up and too many don't give a crap
|
| This is better to make a problem of the district's
| finance department, not the individual school. They can
| solve this by mailing bills to parents and/or information
| about signing up for lunch programs. This is not a
| problem to solve by holding a child's lunch hostage.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I'm often shocked at what my kids are able to choose (as
| elementary students, much worse for middle school) when
| buying cafeteria lunch. Admittedly I went to a small
| parochial school, but when we bought "hot lunch" we were
| given a pre-determined, food pyramid compliant assortment
| and are only choice was chocolate or plain milk. And you
| were done when your tray was empty, or recess was over.
| There was very little waste from cafeteria meals.
|
| Now my middle schooler will choose two cookies and a
| juice and the lunch attendant doesn't bay an eye. Any
| retroactive punishment is long after he's enjoyed his
| food treats or diabetes in early adulthood.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| You don't actually have to crash the jet, just tell everyone
| you did.
| op00to wrote:
| It's a ploy to get foreign adversaries to clean up
| pollution.
|
| "We can't find the wreckage ANYWHERE! Maybe if we cleaned
| up some of this pollution, we would find the plane
| underneath it? Is there anyone who wants to find F-35
| wreckage? Chinaaaaaa?"
| melling wrote:
| Sort of an absurd thing to say. However, it's repeated all
| the time, and in every generation in some form.
|
| One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could
| educate people at a younger age so they understand this,
| maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society.
|
| Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a
| percentage of GDP:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-
| defen...
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| What an odd form of comparison, Military spending is almost
| entirely a function of tax, not Gross Domestic Product of a
| country.
|
| But taking just one aspect of that graph - overall military
| spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we
| were involved in a full scale occupation of another
| country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the
| downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my
| humble opinion) extremely disingenuous to not include the
| direct financing of another country's war (Ukraine) which
| at this time is something around 80 billion.
|
| - Also something to note is underneath your
| gdp<>government-spending graph it states spending in 2022
| was 746 billion, predicted to increase to 1.1 trillion next
| year.
|
| While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.
|
| You are correct in that we need to educate people better,
| it is not accurate to say we could solve a plethora of
| societal issues with just a fraction of the financial fuel
| the military industrial complex requires.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In the US, education spending _significantly_ exceeds
| defense spending. It is almost entirely allocated under
| State budgets, the number you are referring to is
| Federal. The Federal government could stop spending on
| education entirely and expenditures would still exceed
| the military. The US spends far more on education per
| student than almost any other country, per the OECD. It
| raises the question of why the US still has mediocre
| outcomes in education given the amount of money spent on
| it.
|
| The US spends a lot on the military but at least the
| outcome of that expenditure is an exceptional and
| unmatched capability. One can argue whether or not that
| capability is needed, but at least they are getting what
| they are paying for to some extent.
| areyousure wrote:
| > While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.
|
| In case anyone was curious,
| https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/ reports total
| spending of $1.76 trillion on education in fiscal year
| 2022. (It also reports defense spending of $1.11
| trillion. The subpage
| https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending
| includes the number $765.8 billion as part of a
| breakdown.)
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The federal government provides _billions_ of free or reduced
| price meals to school children every year. American schools
| _do not let you_ not eat lunch, if you try to skip lunch you
| will have a lunch forcibly given to you for free for as long
| as it takes the school administration to figure out what is
| going on with your parents. Your parents will be billed for
| the lunches if they can afford it, and if not you will be
| signed up for the federal free lunch program. But either way
| this plays out, they will not allow you to not eat a lunch.
|
| Even if you plead that you ate a huge breakfast and you
| aren't hungry, they will put a tray of food in front of you
| anyway.
|
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-
| assistance/ch...
| runarberg wrote:
| Incompetence is positively correlated with salary and
| responsibility. The more money you handle on your job the
| likelier you are to be incompetent.
|
| It comes as no surprise to me that people responsible for these
| machines of war are more incompetent than you or me.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| > The more money you handle on your job the likelier you are
| to be incompetent.
|
| And your source for this data is...?
| op00to wrote:
| They handle the most money on their job out of anyone ever.
| runarberg wrote:
| Sorry, no, I'm just stating an opinion. And even if I had a
| source, the definition of incompetence varies so widely,
| that surely this statement would hold no additional weight.
| overboard2 wrote:
| Why do you believe it?
| runarberg wrote:
| Because of my misbelieve in capitalism and the belief in
| the corruption of governments. Or as the saying goes:
| "All power corrupts" and all that. On top of that, I am
| no believer in meritocracy (that is I don't believe
| people advance in position based on merit).
|
| Now lets do some thought statistics. I--as a bayesean--
| assign the uniform distribution as a prior to
| _competence_ , that is I assume that competence is
| equally distributed across occupations and positions
| independent of responsibility. Now, lets allow some
| movement between positions and assume correlation between
| responsibility and salaries (that is people being payed
| more are responsible for a greater proportion of the
| system). Now assume there is not a 100% correlation
| between competence and being moved into a greater
| position with a greater salary (that is we assume some
| level of corruption; people moved into greater position
| because of favors, family ties, wealth, gender, etc. Even
| misattributed skills of those promoted [i.e. incompetence
| of those responsible promoting and hiring; i.e. suspect
| positive feedback of incompetence]).
|
| Finally we acknowledge the fact that being moved into a
| position with more responsibility and you don't gain
| skills as you are moved, your competence will decrease
| (that is competence is a function of responsibility and
| skill).
|
| It should be easy to see that your posterior distribution
| of competence to salaries and the posterior distribution
| of competence to responsibility should both be skewed
| towards the right. That is you as you increase
| responsibility and salaries, you will find relatively
| fewer people competent at their jobs.
| 20after4 wrote:
| So basically
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| They are the CEO, handling more money than us plebs.
| ambicapter wrote:
| He handles _lots_ of money at his job.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I guess I don't watch enough spy movies, but... how do you use
| a not-really-missing jet to flush out an intelligence leak?
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I'm delighted you ask because I watch too many.
|
| You crash an end-of-life trainer dressed up as an F35 in a
| carefully chosen site with no natural foot traffic. The FBI
| then sits in a bush and arrests everyone that turns up.
|
| The F35 is the prime intelligence target for Russia before it
| gets in Ukrainian hands so they might risk some of their most
| valuable "illegals" i.e. the long-term embedded agents with
| flawless identities. For a big target, you gotta go big. Hang
| out the biggest prize in the most embarrassing way you can.
| This is a typical type of plot from The Americans TV show.
|
| That or it's testing the adversarial satellite or balloon
| surveillance tech for how long it takes to find the craft.
| Maybe it's a test of Open Source Intelligence networks. Maybe
| it had genuine stealth tech and they are monitoring channels
| to find out if it was being successfully tracked. A top of
| the line stealth craft is hell of a honeypot so there are
| endless things that might get revealed - I imagine all
| hostile intelligence networks are lit up like christmas trees
| - it's like a barium meal.
|
| Do I believe any of these? Nah. Reality is more ridiculous
| than fiction so no doubt it really is the case that they have
| just lost a prize intelligence asset.
| GhostWhisperer wrote:
| don't let a crisis go to waste
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| let's be realistic. even their highly prized illegals can't
| collect much intel about an f35 on us territory.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Or a new marketing campaign from Lockheed Martin - 'stealth
| technology so good, even we can't find it'.
|
| Meanwhile the loony tune demographic has decided that it flew
| to China on Biden's orders.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's definitely BS. Transponders aside, the US has radar and
| near real-time satellite imagery of every square inch of
| American territory. There is a zero percent chance they don't
| know where this plane is.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| If you watch YouTube replay simulations[0] with ATC (air
| traffic control) when pilots violate a TFR (temporary flight
| restriction) for something like The President it's comical
| how long it takes for the interception fighters to find the
| target. It turns out the F-* radar is terrible at these kinds
| of situations. They almost always end up getting vectored in
| by air traffic control with their much more powerful ground
| based radar.
|
| Just one example of how this kind of stuff plays out in the
| real world.
|
| [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Onx46fLyncM
| dylan604 wrote:
| Individual radar tracking on the F-* planes is kind an
| advantage as they are typically vectored in by airborne
| radar like AWACs in actual combat. There are advantages to
| this, with the most obvious is the opponent doesn't know
| where the attack is coming from since they are only being
| lit up by the AWACs. They can be vectored in from the most
| advantageous angle for the attacker in total passive mode.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There are not going to be many situations where you need
| this advantage, have an AWACS but your opponent doesn't,
| and your AWACS is able to survive while being close
| enough to be helpful (both Russia and China have missiles
| that outrange an AWACS's radar, and the China and the US
| have stealthy planes and slightly lesser range missiles).
| It's a real limitation, it's problematic, and it has no
| upsides.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| That's a really good point - I'm certainly familiar with
| AWACS in concept but I didn't connect the dots here.
|
| Thing is, in these scenarios they're the only armed
| aircraft around and their targets never have radar or any
| instrumentation/defense/even detection for it. So they
| could (and likely do) blast and paint all day and they
| still can't find bug smashers in dense urban environments
| like you most often see with TFRs.
|
| I can understand the fighter radar is probably designed
| assuming assistance from AWACS but it still seems really
| strange to me.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| It isn't - the fighter is not designed on the assumption
| it can rely on an AWACS, because they're very vulnerable
| aircraft. For many F-* jets, AWACS datalink was actually
| added later on.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The fighters can actually receive the radar information
| from AWACs, so the pilots see the radar image. However,
| just like not having total CAPs coverage over the US,
| there's not a lot of AWACs coverage either. I'd be
| shocked if there's any mechanism for them receiving
| civilian ATC radar. To that end, how much radar coverage
| is actually there? Isn't civilian traffic pretty much IDs
| broadcast from the planes?
| nradov wrote:
| Civilian air traffic control relies mainly on secondary
| surveillance radar including aircraft transponders, plus
| ADS-B. Primary radar coverage is limited to larger
| airports plus a few border and military areas. An
| aircraft can hide pretty effectively in most US airspace
| by just flying low with transponders switched off.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| The fighter response to 9/11 was proof enough of the
| incompetence of the modern american air defense system.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Even after that event and two decades it's still a joke.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Which is why the regulations on passenger aircraft got
| tightened up, it's easier to get rid/impede the attack
| vector than to overcome the physical limitations of a
| radar antenna in a fighter jet's nose cone vs a many
| meters large ground radar antenna.
| kkielhofner wrote:
| All of these TFR violations are early/inexperienced
| Cessna 172 pilots (or similar) who aren't up on TFRs,
| just lost, etc. They often can't even manage the radio
| and just go completely silent, blissfully unaware
| anything is happening until an F-16 shows up next to them
| hailing them saying things like "US military armed
| fighter aircraft. Acknowledge this by rocking your
| wings.", etc. Of course assuming the fighter eventually
| finds them in the first place...
|
| What's really scary about ATC vectoring the fighters in
| is a bad actor could just as easily use that open comms
| to evade the fighter aircraft. Although they're obviously
| faster and more maneuverable it gets back to the first
| scenario I mentioned - the fighters can't find a target
| when they're not actively trying to evade them.
|
| It would be pretty easy and straightforward for a bad
| actor to get a few hours of lessons, take up a Cessna
| loaded with improvised explosives of some type, and do a
| lot of damage. A lot of smaller air strips/fields don't
| even have a tower so they could get up there before
| anyone really has a clue.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Although they're obviously faster and more maneuverable
| it gets back to the first scenario I mentioned
|
| This reminds me of Barry Seal taking advantage of his
| slower aircraft with a million dollar door to avoid the
| faster jets with short legs.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODIZKyevVxQ
|
| of course, the majority of that movie turned the creative
| license knob to an 11
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > All of these TFR violations are early/inexperienced
| Cessna 172 pilots (or similar) who aren't up on TFRs,
| just lost, etc.
|
| I'm (as a German) a drone pilot myself and looking to
| start ultralight next year, and the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs
| annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons
| of junk, hard to parse and keep track of, and hell I get
| that the primary glass of aircraft is supposed to be
| certified, but why on earth aren't there
| smartphone/tablet apps that keep up with TFRs and alert a
| pilot? Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of
| cellphone towers.
|
| [1] https://fixingnotams.org/the-problem-why-are-pilots-
| deeply-c...
| kkielhofner wrote:
| > the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when
| just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep
| track of
|
| Like many unusual situations there are usually at least
| two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I
| described:
|
| 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those
| unfamiliar).
|
| 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic
| control.
|
| When air traffic control notices these people violate
| airspace they always try to reach them via radio. In the
| event they're reachable it's "we have a phone number for
| you". When they go silent it's send up some fighters AND
| "here's a phone number for you".
|
| > Most of GA is low altitude anyway so in reach of
| cellphone towers.
|
| This is frowned upon. When airlines ask you to turn off
| your cell phones it is for two real reasons:
|
| 1) Pay attention to the safety briefing (no one does
| anyway, and no one turns their cell phones off).
|
| 2) The request of cell carriers. From what I understand
| cellular devices at altitude with significantly better
| line of sight are somewhat problematic to the towers as
| devices are able to attempt connection/association to
| many more than they usually would. Apparently combined
| with the faster speed the carriers don't appreciate this.
| Of course they deal with it with all kinds of means in
| terms of directional antennas, etc but like I said I've
| heard it's an issue.
|
| I point out #2 because there's likely little industry
| support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you
| add an additional safety issue because users (pilots)
| will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell
| connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc
| is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Like many unusual situations there are usually at least
| two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I
| described:
|
| > 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those
| unfamiliar).
|
| > 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic
| control.
|
| Yeah, #1 is easy enough to happen because NOTAM (and,
| while we're ranting, METAR as well, or the fact that
| aviation still uses feet and knots despite everyone but
| the US and UK being on metric) is fundamentally broken, a
| relic of very old times that has never been updated
| (similar to the clusterfuck that is flight/staff planning
| and booking) because no one wants to invest money into
| upgrading all the legacy crap. So all it takes for a
| serious incident is a simple human error: forgetting to
| change a comms frequency, overlooking a NOTAM in all the
| spam, or accidentally using metric units.
|
| > I point out #2 because there's likely little industry
| support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you
| add an additional safety issue because users (pilots)
| will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell
| connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc
| is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
|
| I wasn't talking about commercial air flights, I was
| referring to the Cessna and other small-scale GA. They're
| barely faster than a high-speed train (an 172 manages 300
| km/h, a German ICE 350 km/h, and I can use LTE in the
| latter), so for wide parts of any GA flight a pilot
| should have LTE access on their phone.
|
| Anyway: yes, people will learn to depend on their
| phones/tablets to alert them if they enter a TFR zone or
| that they have to change their radio frequency. But
| ffs... the status quo leads to so many issues every year
| [1], because pilots have _zero_ assistance if they 're in
| an older plane with a classic, no-glass setup, or in a
| plane with a glass cockpit but no assistance. Adding a
| fallback option is the safer way, it avoids incidents.
|
| And the truly safe way would be to upgrade all the legacy
| crap, or at least augment it in a backward-compatible
| way: a digital carrier in radios that can carry
| cryptographically signed messages for radios that signal
| new frequency and squawk codes, for example, that the
| pilot simply has to confirm and be done.
|
| [1]
| https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-
| often-...
| nradov wrote:
| That's simply not true. The US military only has primary
| radar coverage over a small fraction of the country. (Air
| traffic control primarily relies on secondary surveillance
| radar.)
|
| Only the weather satellites in geostationary orbits provide
| near real-time imagery, and they lack the resolution to spot
| something the size of an aircraft. High resolution images
| come from spy satellites in highly inclined low orbits which
| provide only intermittent coverage of any particular
| location. And they can't see through clouds.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Ah, yes, radar. Notoriously effective on a _stealth fighter_.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Isn't the whole point of an F-35 that it is really hard to
| track with radar?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It can be.
|
| I believe for "routine" training they'll keep a radar
| reflector in them. Very little need to have stealth when
| bouncing around the US.
| AustinDev wrote:
| I was in a stealth fighter squadron. It really depends on
| the mission profile as to determine if the reflectors
| will be on the plane during CONUS training. If we're
| doing BVR 'tag' drills, they won't have them installed.
| If we're just putting butts in seats to keep certs
| current or maybe some air to ground training, then the
| reflectors will be installed.
|
| Caveat, I was in the Air Force and I'm not too familiar
| with NATOPS which is what I believe the Marines would be
| operating under to determine SOP. I was not a pilot, but
| I was in operations and received the same briefings. My
| training was also from when we first got real stealth
| fighters and SOP has probably evolved a lot in the last
| decade.
|
| What's most interesting about this story to me is... What
| sort of mishap would lead to an ejection with autopilot
| left functioning? That all seems very peculiar. Weird way
| to join the Caterpillar Club.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| Dunno but if they dont find the aircraft it will be
| difficult to determine how it happened. My guess would be
| weird software. There might be something with the F35b's
| because there are a few crashes in the headlines.
|
| Worst case scenario someone slaved it to a netowrk and
| stole it since the f35bs have VTOL.
| robarr wrote:
| "The Caterpillar Club is an informal association of
| people who have successfully used a parachute to bail out
| of a disabled aircraft. After authentication by the
| parachute maker, applicants receive a membership
| certificate and a distinctive lapel pin. The nationality
| of the person whose life was saved by parachute and
| ownership of the aircraft are not factors in determining
| qualification for membership; anybody whose life was
| saved by using a parachute after bailing out of a
| disabled aircraft is eligible. The requirement that the
| aircraft is disabled naturally excludes parachuting
| enthusiasts in the normal course of a recreational jump,
| or those involved in military training jumps."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_Club
| dctoedt wrote:
| Brought back memories of my dad's "induction" into the
| Caterpillar Club in 1962. When we cleaned out and sold my
| folks' house, I took a picture of his framed membership
| certificate; he often wore the lapel pin on civilian
| sport-coat lapels.
|
| https://www.commondraft.org/Caterpillar-Club-
| certificate.png
| qingcharles wrote:
| Amazing. Thank you for that. Do you exist because he had
| an ejection seat?
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Do you exist because he had an ejection seat?_
|
| No, I was a little tyke at the time. (The story:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33348425)
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Outside of combat missions, stealth aircraft have little
| widgets on them which multiply their radar signature.
| Stealth aircraft are meant to be stealth only in real
| combat missions.
| perihelions wrote:
| Seems to be this thing discussed here,
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luneburg_lens#Radar_reflect
| or
|
| (caption: _" Luneburg reflectors (the marked protrusion)
| on an F-35"_)
|
| edit: Also here (with quotes from a US Air Force Avionics
| Technician):
|
| https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-
| stealth-a... ( _" How Luneburg lens radar reflectors are
| used to make stealth aircraft visible on radar screens"_)
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| It's really hard to track with _active_ radar, which is why
| the first thing NATO does in a foreign country is bomb all
| TV and radio stations off the air. With passive methods it
| 's no problem at all.
| rplst8 wrote:
| What do TV and radio stations have to do with active
| radar?
| bunabhucan wrote:
| You could use a focused receiver to look for TV signals
| being emitted from an object thousands of feet in the air
| over (say) the ocean off the coast of California. Since
| you know there is no TV station antenna floating in the
| sky out there you know you are getting reflected rf from
| a plane.
|
| Your receiver is "passive" - it doesn't emit a signal -
| so the attacking enemy has to find it visually. If the
| enemy bomb all the TV antennas then you need to emit your
| own signal to generate the reflection.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Nothing. That's the point. You don't need active radar
| with the right mix of broadcast stations and math tricks.
| itsyaboi wrote:
| The other way around, it's easy to track these with
| passive radar which is why all radio emitters get bombed.
| [deleted]
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| TV and radio stations can be used for passive radar.
| Passive radar is when you use existing radio sources as
| you illumination source and your radar system is listen-
| only. Stealth aircraft tend to be more visible on passive
| radar since passive is usually a longer wavelength that
| the aircraft was not designed for. You can even DIY a
| passive radar.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/passive-radar-with-sdr
| mcv wrote:
| It seemed like such a good idea at the time.
| woodruffw wrote:
| The US military absolutely does not have total ground radar
| across the entire country.
|
| (And even if it did, radar is not magic. If the plane is at
| the bottom of a murky lake, then no amount of radar or
| satellite imagery is going to find it.)
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| >And even if it did, radar is not magic. If the plane is at
| the bottom of a murky lake, then no amount of radar or
| satellite imagery is going to find it.
|
| The purpose of the radar would not be to see the plane at
| the bottom of a lake, but to provide a flight path after
| the ejection. If they had radar coverage, they should be
| able to see either where it ejected with an unstable flight
| path that put it within a fairly small circle of the
| ejection or on a stable flight path that gives them a more
| or less straight line to search along.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| This is not even close to true.
|
| ATC radar regularly loses small planes on 'primary' radar
| (primary radar being pure radar), and has to rely on the
| transponder. There are many areas where you simply don't have
| primary coverage, especially close to the ground. I've flown
| through military controlled airspace where they lose radar
| contact with me in a Cessna less than 10 miles from the base.
| ianburrell wrote:
| BTW, the only real-time satellite imagery of all of the US is
| from weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Which has
| the resolution of a city.
|
| If near real-time, you mean a couple of times per day. There
| aren't enough LEO observation satellites to provide complete
| coverage.
| xeromal wrote:
| There's a handful of missing nukes in the US from some very
| large crashed planes that we still haven't found.
| [deleted]
| egberts1 wrote:
| Still missing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash
| naikrovek wrote:
| > the US has radar and near real-time satellite imagery of
| every square inch of American territory.
|
| have you been watching prime-time crime fighting drama TV
| shows?
|
| the implementation of that system is probably 8x as bad as it
| sounds, and it sounds too complex to implement in less than
| two decades.
|
| real-time (or "near" real-time, whatever that means) imagery
| of every square inch of the continental US? No.
| Arrath wrote:
| Even if the imagery was real-time, the process to get
| access to it most surely isn't.
| Simulacra wrote:
| When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was the F-35
| malfunctioning ejection seat issue that was due to counterfeit
| parts.
| aragonite wrote:
| From this F-35 crash video last year at least it looks like
| they fixed the ejection problem at least!
|
| https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/pilot-ejects-from-f-35-at-...
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| And they want to replace A-10's, F/A-18's, and F-16's with this
| overpriced MIC boondoggle. It costs almost 2x/engine hour of a
| Viper, and the total program cost will exceed $2 trillion.
| jjkeddo199 wrote:
| Absolutely inappropriate to post something like this to Twitter
| before exhausting all other options (civilian airports, drone
| clubs, Space Force satellites) first. I feel like the Twitter
| account manager shared this out of desire to go viral, rather
| than securing the plane.
| pcurve wrote:
| " we are focusing our attention north of JB Charleston, around
| Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion"
|
| Sounds like it's in the water. It won't be easy to fish them
| out even if you find them. They probably determined security
| risk is very low.
| tivert wrote:
| Maybe it's another Cornfield Bomber
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber):
|
| > The "Cornfield Bomber" is the nickname given to a Convair F-106
| Delta Dart, operated by the 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron of
| the United States Air Force. In 1970, during a training exercise,
| it made an unpiloted landing in a farmer's field in Montana,
| suffering only minor damage, after the pilot had ejected from the
| aircraft. The aircraft, recovered and repaired, was returned to
| service, and is currently on display at the National Museum of
| the United States Air Force.
|
| Given it's a military plane (which IIRC, aren't required to have
| transponders or have them activated) and stealth. it seems
| understandable that it would be hard to find if it didn't crash
| immediately.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > aren't required to have transponders or have them activated
|
| Seems like you'd want them activated in domestic airspace.
| [deleted]
| tra3 wrote:
| The confluence of events that allowed an unpiloted jet to land
| with its engine idling.. its unbelievable.
| kristjansson wrote:
| Incredible:
|
| > One of the other pilots on the mission was reported to have
| radioed Foust during his descent by parachute that "you'd
| better get back in it!"
| mcpackieh wrote:
| The best part is he actually did (nine years later.)
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Most aircraft are designed to be inherently stable so as long
| as it doesn't hit anything a good percentage of them should
| be able to manage pretty well w/o a pilot.
| elil17 wrote:
| The F35 and other modern fighter jets are the exception to
| the rule: they are inherently unstable because this makes
| them more maneuverable. They use electronic control systems
| to keep themselves stable.
| fragmede wrote:
| It was only possible to fly the original stealth fighter,
| the F-117, with the help of computers controlling the
| plane, due to its unorthodox design.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| So what does a FCS do after an ejection.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I've always wondered what his squadronmates changed his
| callsign to afterwards.
| ourmandave wrote:
| O'Chute
| standeven wrote:
| Scarecrow?
| cdchn wrote:
| Walkhome?
| ynniv wrote:
| Valet?
| k12sosse wrote:
| You know where they're going to find it?
|
| The last place they look
| defrost wrote:
| The big question here is was it a Martin-Baker ejection seat?
|
| If so, there's a limited edition high end wristwatch in it for
| the pilot:
|
| https://us.bremont.com/pages/explore-bremont-partnerships-ma...
| lbourdages wrote:
| It's more affordable than I thought, I expected one more zero
| on the price tag...
| z303 wrote:
| and a Tie
|
| https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/
| amelius wrote:
| Wearing a tie during ejection can be dangerous.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| This is a fine timepiece.
|
| A worthy chronometer to suit a crashed pilot.
| amelius wrote:
| A watch without GPS?
| netsharc wrote:
| Simple enough to google, yes it is:
|
| https://martin-baker.com/products/mk16-ejection-seat-for-f-3...
| steve1977 wrote:
| So I guess at least the stealth part is working as designed...
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| It's not uncommon for jets to fly for long distances after a
| pilot ejects. In one incident I responded to, the crew of an F4
| ejected due to a fire, but the jet continued to fly over about
| half of Nevada until it eventually crashed near Tohnapah.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| That F4 is shaped in a way that wants to stay in the air.
|
| The F35 is shaped in a way that only flys well with 10-40
| thousand pounds of thrust.
|
| I am extremely skeptical a modern fighter jet wpuld coast and
| set it self down in a field.
| [deleted]
| tornato7 wrote:
| Interesting. The article doesn't say why the pilot ejected. If
| the jet were able to continue flying for hours in autopilot,
| maybe the pilot ejected a bit prematurely, no? Though it it
| continued flying I would expect it to be on ADS-B.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| I'd think there's clear procedures for pilot of such a craft?
| If x occurs & can't be fixed by doing y or z, then eject.
|
| > Though it it continued flying I would expect it to be on
| ADS-B.
|
| This is a military aircraft. Depending on its mission,
| transponders may or may not be enabled.
|
| What _did_ surprise me: if a 2-plane mission, why didn 't the
| other jet follow the now-empty one? As a opposed to landing
| right after. Low on fuel?
|
| At least it could have recorded speed & heading.
| z303 wrote:
| > I'd think there's clear procedures for pilot of such a
| craft? If x occurs & can't be fixed by doing y or z, then
| eject.
|
| Indeed they do (or at least did)
|
| https://youtu.be/Aa1Ba_NEobs
| bmitc wrote:
| It would seem to me that a missing F-35 is a pretty big
| security threat.
| hulitu wrote:
| > It would seem to me that a missing F-35 is a pretty big
| security threat.
|
| If you believe what is written on HN: actually no, not at
| all.
| sschueller wrote:
| With all the software issues how do we know the plane didn't
| just randomly eject the pilot due to some buffer overflow...
| belter wrote:
| Or the AI they were trying on decided so...
| fransje26 wrote:
| Add the transponder not working, and you come to the
| conclusion that the jet was operating exactly as it was
| supposed to, by design...
| flangola7 wrote:
| Hopefully that isn't a networked system. It should be
| physical action only.
| sschueller wrote:
| Eject-by-wire, I can envision some proponents for
| automated ejection in case the pilot is not responding or
| a machine is able to determine ejection is needed before
| a pilot realizes and it would be too late.
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| When you have to eject anyway, you would probably want to do it
| in an area where you can get help relatively quickly, due to it
| being quite a bit dangerous, and not in an area with no
| infrastructure or over the ocean.
| hulitu wrote:
| > maybe the pilot ejected a bit prematurely, no?
|
| He just wanted to be sure. With all those issues F35 had i
| wouldn't think twice when to eject. /s
| Bud wrote:
| [dead]
| h2odragon wrote:
| Why shouldn't "finders keepers" apply here? If their jet crashed,
| unoccupied, on my land, why ain't it mine now?
|
| At least do the "prize value" salvage reward they do for ships.
| floatrock wrote:
| Sadly the law of salvage is only part of maritime law
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage
|
| Hills of south carolina are out of its juristiction.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| fortunately in the low country.. there really aren't hills
| just marshes and wetlands, but in all seriousness it would be
| a pretty cool salvage for _someone_
| kavalg wrote:
| Could it be hijacked by an adversary that hacked into the plane's
| computer?
| httpz wrote:
| Wait.. does this mean an enemy fighter jet with F-35 level of
| stealth capabilities can penetrate the US mainland without being
| detected?
|
| I thought US had the air defense system that can defend against
| some level stealth aircrafts. Is that not the case?
| azalemeth wrote:
| In addition to the other comments, it's worth pointing out that
| (a) stealth aircraft deliberately use radar corner reflectors
| and other methods to increase their radar signature, reserving
| "stealthing up" for missions that require it; (b) almost all
| forms of identifying and locating an aircraft in flight besides
| radar require it to be transmitting RF (eg ads!) yet the
| conditions likely to lead to ejection likely lead to a
| reduction in the ability to do this; and (c) search and rescue
| in deep water is really really hard as water strongly absorbs
| and scatters most forms of radiation likely to be used .
| sethhochberg wrote:
| If I'd lost an aircraft with a bunch of classified stealth
| features, and I perhaps also had air defense systems with a
| bunch of classified stealth countermeasures, I might be
| inclined to ask the locals if they've seen the thing in the
| swamp out back before I did anything that might reveal anything
| about the limitations of that stealth tech or abilities of the
| system that could track it.
| make3 wrote:
| "why isn't there a tracker on those planes", it feels to me like
| a tracker is the last thing you would want to put on a stealth
| fighter
| fallingmeat wrote:
| so they were not kidding about that low RCS!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Did they find it jet?
| mylittlebrain wrote:
| Maybe the news reports are in error? They said autopilot was left
| on. The pilot survived. Surely they must know the settings for
| the course. It sounds like an episode in one of those spy
| thrillers.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| A bunch more discussion on this dupe over here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37555172
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's in Sasquatch country now, we'll find it 20 years from now in
| an area we already searched.
| skunkworker wrote:
| I'm curious if the F35 had a luneburg lens installed or not. If
| it didn't and did not have an active transponder it would make
| things much more difficult.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Why not use the Find my F-35 app?
| 3seashells wrote:
| So.. Can one deduce jet vectors from disturbed clouds? Soldier
| movement from grass swinging in the wind. Can one visualize
| patterns not following a model?
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| The F-35 really is the most expensive joke in American military
| aviation history.
| skazazes wrote:
| So much so that America's allies are lining up to get them!
| miguelazo wrote:
| Yeah, and that's totally legitimate interest. Has nothing to
| do with sleazy lobbying and attempts to curry political
| favor.
| [deleted]
| andrewstuart wrote:
| They should put Apple Airtags in the F-35s.
|
| I have one on my cat and when he runs away he is not hard to
| find.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Still needs someone with an iPhone to walk by and update its
| location
| jeffrallen wrote:
| UFO: Unfound flying object?
| Cryptoclidus wrote:
| UNFO: *not flying
| selimnairb wrote:
| They should be ashamed to make this request. How much money do we
| give them every year for "defense"? This is embarrassing. Fire
| everyone in this chain of command, all the way to the top. Oh,
| wait, Tuberville won't let the Senate confirm any general
| officers. What a laughing stock we have become.
| pgraf wrote:
| They should have placed an Apple AirTag under the pilots seat...
| *sarcasm off*
| Stevvo wrote:
| A B-17 once landed at an airfield in Belgium without any crew on
| board. Just by chance it was pointing in the right direction,
| with the right amount of lift and drag and thrust.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| This sounded like there had to be more to it but found this [1]
| and it makes it even weirder.
|
| > The parachutes were still onboard and no indication of
| gunfire or blood caused by hostile attacks were seen on the
| plane.
|
| [1] https://worldwarwings.com/still-unsolved-story-
| of-b-17-landi...
| i80and wrote:
| A Quora answer[1] suggests that the "parachutes" found were
| just the empty packs, and the crew was found safe.
|
| That the plane landed intact is pretty cool though!
|
| [1] https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-the-crew-of-
| the-B-17-...
| ggambetta wrote:
| FTA: "The Second World War II"...
| idontwantthis wrote:
| I think there were experiments with RC B17s. I wonder if this
| was one and they chose to emergency land it but had to keep it
| a secret from the Belgian airfield crew.
| jononomo wrote:
| What might cause a pilot to need to eject from an airplane that
| is not in any distress? The pilot apparently had the time to put
| the airplane into an auto-pilot mode before ejecting. Why not
| just fly the plane back to base?
|
| I always thought pilots ejected when the plane was about to
| crash.
|
| Given that the plane costs $150 million, it seems like an
| extraordinarily expensive decision to make if the plane is not
| about to crash.
| monlockandkey wrote:
| Have fun searching for a stealth fighter...
| omginternets wrote:
| Finders keepers!
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| They should've put an AirTag on it.
| zarmin wrote:
| It's at Diego Garcia with MH370
| yabones wrote:
| Have they said whether the transponder was active on the jet?
| They usually have the ADSB beacon live when flying near airports,
| but if it was turned off it would be a bit trickier to find.
| Also, if the retroreflector wasn't extended it might be hard for
| active radar to track it as well. Worst case scenario would be if
| it was in "full stealth" mode -- that would be the situation
| where we discover that NORAD air defense systems can't detect our
| own jets!
| giantg2 wrote:
| They should be able to track gross location on radar. The
| stealth capabilities are mostly focused on thwarting precise
| location and missile guidance radars.
|
| The issue here is finding the precise crash site. General
| location should be known. Trying to find it under the tree
| canopy could be more challenging depending on how rural it is.
| giarc wrote:
| I think they do have the general location, they keep
| mentioning two lakes near the base. So I suspect it's at the
| bottom of one of them, although then it's odd they are asking
| for public help finding them.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not too odd to ask for help. Generally they want
| anyone who heard/saw something to report what they saw. I
| witnessed a jet crash once. Even though I was a kid and
| they knew the exact location, they still wanted the
| information. If it did crash into a lake, it's possible
| someone heard it while they were fishing or something.
| jvm___ wrote:
| "Dagobah" was how I heard the search area described. Or
| parts of it at least. "The weather was horrible" when the
| pilot ejected, so if it was pouring rain and slipped nicely
| into a swamp somewhere - and then the rain doused anything
| smoking...
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| For that matter, Joint Base Charleston is only around 25
| miles from the Atlantic Ocean.
|
| It doesn't take a Mach 1.6 aircraft very long to go 25
| miles. That's only about 75 seconds of flight time.
| cvccvroomvroom wrote:
| This is odd because military jets in the area here in the area
| (in CONUS) invariably have their transponders on.
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| > invariably
|
| You keep saying that word...I do not think it means what you
| think it means.
|
| More seriously, military aircraft throughout the US _often_
| do not have their ADS-B or transponders turned on.
| seatac76 wrote:
| It wasn't active, reasons were not given. [1]
|
| [1] https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35-cant-be-found-
| aft...
| blobbers wrote:
| Anytime something like this happens, wouldn't they have seismic
| sensors that would detect a crash of this size?
|
| I can't see one of these things going down softly once pilot
| ejects unless it had some kind of drone mode, in which case god
| help us who knows where it is?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Funniest headline I read about this:
|
| "F-35 carrying Epstein client list goes missing"
|
| from a news satire site
| msgilligan wrote:
| Found it: https://babylonbee.com/news/bad-luck-military-
| announces-lost...
| carbonPr1m8 wrote:
| [flagged]
| tclover wrote:
| what a clown state lmao
| [deleted]
| elfbargpt wrote:
| Seeing some (probably very fake) tweets that the unmanned jet
| landed in Cuba. No reason to believe that's true, but I do wonder
| whether it would be remotely possible for someone to take the jet
| over. I imagine it has a lot of proprietary software inside
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Looks like it did not cause fire and after crash
| mortureb wrote:
| I'm so confused? Is it that they can't make a gps tracker that
| works after a catastrophic crash?
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