What can you do when the Air Force loses a stealth fighter?
The US military has asked for the public’s help to locate one of its $80m (£65m) F-35 fighter jets after the pilot ejected from the aircraft.
Use images from reconnaissance satellites?
It’s supposed to be hard to spot?
Maybe reconnaissance satellites are not stationed over S Carolina?
Maybe they could also locate the lost nuclear bomb down there as well.
I’m surprised the ELT is not working. It must have made a big boom.
It was the US Marine Corps, not the US Air Force, who misplaced this one.
The “public’s help” part is obvious. Did you see it go by, or see a fiery crash of something falling from the sky, or encounter some fresh wreckage while bushwacking someplace or plowing your farm? If so, call 1-800-My-Lost-Jet.
FYI, here’s an irreverent non-FQ thread on the same situation:
This problem dogs Invisible Jets.
Wonder Woman can never remember where she parks.
So, let me ask for clarification.
This Factual Questions thread is to factually discuss search techniques that could be used to locate the missing Marine F-35 aircraft?
Because we already have a different thread for general foolishness about this news item.
Stealth planes are designed to minimise reflection of radar waves. They’re not invisible.
And spy satellites are not “stationed” above any particular spot. They orbit the Earth, and on orbits far below geostationary.
Would a fighter jet flying in the US have its transponder on (i.e. it is not trying to be stealthy)? Doesn’t the transponder help ATC track where the plane is?
One problem is that plane crashes very often do not look like airplanes. If the wreckage is submerged, the so much the harder.
ETA: Civil Air Patrol Scanner Training slides – ATTENTION: POWERPOINT FILE
Photographs of crash sites are on slides 193 through 224. As shown, some crash sites are difficult to see.
Almost certainly, and Yes.
We (at least I) don’t yet know why the pilot jumped out.
If the cause was engine failure in that single engine airplane then the transponder would go off-line when most of the electrical system did right after the engine quit. So a stealthy airplane would be practically un-trackable by ATC after that moment. On the other hand, without an engine the remaining flight time and flight distance would be pretty short from the last point ATC (or their wingman) knew where they were. So the area to search will be small-ish.
If the engine was still running and the rest of the avionics and hydraulics were operating normally, such that the airplane might have continued on obliviously until fuel exhaustion minutes or hours later, then the potential search area is huge. But then why did the pilot jump out?
A conundrum to me. So far.
Moderator Note
This thread is in FQ, so please stick to the facts.
If you want to have a less factual discussion, join the MPSIMS thread that @LSLGuy linked to above (and repeated here):
They found the debris field. It is near where I grew up. It’s in a very rural area with farmland and forest.
Near Stuckey, SC.
from the BBC:
The wreckage of the $100m (£80m) plane - which disappeared on Sunday afternoon - was discovered in rural Williamsburg County, said authorities.
The debris found has been confirmed as the wreckage of the missing plane, a military spokesperson told the BBC.
“The mishap is currently under investigation, and we are unable to provide additional details to preserve the integrity of the investigative process,” the Marine Corps said on Monday after the search ended.
The public has been asked to keep away from the area to allow investigators to do their work.
The fighter jet was left in autopilot mode when the pilot ejected, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston told NBC News, adding that it may have been airborne for some time, complicating its discovery.
The news said the transponder was malfunctioning (among other things) complicating the ability to locate it.
Do military jets have “black” boxes in them? (Flight Data Recorders)
Apparently, some of them have a Deployable Flight Incident Recorder Set (DFIRS), a hardier, even more survivable black box designed to be blown free of the plane once the computer system detects the ejection seats have been used, or if it detects a collision.
On at least some jets the FDR is attached to the ejection seat itself. Back in my era they were very limited in duration and in number of parameters. I have no clue about F-35s specifically.