No real facts, but obviously an investigation is underway.
I would have thought that with the military’s fascination for acronyms, they would have had an acronym to use.
Maybe something like “SDFU”.
Oh man, that’s good!
Yes, meant purely in good-natured humor. I’ve deployed with both the Marine Corps and Army before (as Air Force) and have worked with the Army and Navy, learning that:
- If you need it broken or dead, give it to a Marine.
- If you need more paperwork than necessary, with a delay on delivery, but weekly staff meetings overloaded with PowerPoint while simply awaiting a contract with an acquisition source, give it to a Soldier.
- If you need it sunken or to be a navigational hazard to commerce, give it to a Sailor.
- If you need it with more bells and whistles than necessary to act as a ‘multi-mission platform’ that doesn’t really specialize in anything, or simply have money to burn, give it to an Airman.
- If you’re not sure you need it, and won’t know what to do with it on arrival, give it to a Guardian.
Needless to say, all the branches levied their opinions and “expertise” on the F-35 program. :: D&R ::
Tripler
Man, I’m on fire tonight!! 
thx for clearing up the “mishap” phrase …
to a non-native-speaker it still sounds a bit like “ooops…” to me .
The DoD’s logic is that the term “accident” carries a strong connotation of “It just happened, nobody could have predicted or prevented it”. Which is not what they want.
A mishap is literally a happening that was bad. IOW “something bad happened”. No connotation that god or bad luck or randomness did it.
Instead, there is a clear cause or causes, whether mechanical or human or weather or communication or … And by golly whatever that collection of cause(s) was, we’ll find it and if possible do things differently going forward to prevent or minimize recurrences.
There’s speculation that the malfunction that caused the pilot to eject was…the ejection mechanism.
What we know about the Marine Corps F-35 fighter jet crash and what went wrong | AP News
The Marine Corps’ variant of the F-35 is different from the Air Force and Navy versions in that it can take off and land like a helicopter — which allows it to operate on amphibious assault ships. But it’s also different in that it’s the only one of the three variants that has an auto-eject function on its ejection seat, according to seat manufacturer Martin-Baker. That has raised questions as to whether the malfunction the pilot experienced was the seat itself.
Yes, good one!
I still have my box of crayons from a good friend.
Interesting. So far no real evidence for that, just the open question of “why jump out of an evidently flyable jet?”
Off top of head I can think of a couple of other potential reasons.
-
Spatial disorientation such that the pilot’s gyros got so confused they couldn’t control the airplane even though it was on a reasonably even keel. Jumping out at low altitude under those circumstances would be be the book answer. There have been reports of major bad weather in the area at the time.
-
Lightning strike. Between startle and perhaps knocking out some of the fully-computerized instruments and displays, the pilot may have hastily concluded the thing wasn’t flyable while he was still in the clouds and close to the ground. The pilot then jumps out, the computers self-reset, and the airplane toddles off solo to its eventual crunchy fate.
-
There have been a spate of issues over the years with the oxygen supply system of the F-35. Resulting in partial asphyxiation, hypoxia, and some degree of panic attack. USN & USMC T-45 & F/A-18s went around that bush for awhile too. Of course once this starts occurring around the fleet, pilots get over-sensitized and a certain amount of mass hysteria causes additional events of simple nerves and overexertion to be reported as malfunctions. Jumping out at low altitude, versus just removing your face mask seems like a more reasonable response, but suddenly being unable to breath has a way of occupying all your brain bytes in a manner non-conducive to calm rational reflection.
As to the airplane on “autopilot” I rather suspect that’s more a matter of computerized fly-by-wire airplanes having artificial stability. Such that in the absence of control inputs the computers will keep the thing going dead-straight ahead & level. Unlike an old fashioned airplane that is stable-ish over a term of seconds but will inevitably wander off into a spiral dive within a minute or two. Especially when just de-stabilized by the loss of a bunch of weight forward when the seat and pilot and canopy depart, plus very different airflow and drag around the now-weird fuselage.
Aren’t fighter jets, particularly stealth jets, inherently unstable? As in, they need their computers working to keep it flyable.
There was an ear-witness for the crash. Be sure to watch the video with your volume up.
Randolph White is a legend. I kept expecting him to say “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
Most of the memes that I’ve seen revolve around Marines being so dumb that they actually eat crayons. Do a Google image search for “Marines eating crayons” and you’ll get a lot of relevant results.
We saw it flying upside down 100 feet above the trees, then heard a big explosion, but we didn’t realize anything was wrong…
Sounds like maybe we’ve found a few new recruits for the Marines once those kids get old enough. 
These must be the equal and opposite people to the ones who live a mile from an airport or hospital and go into a full-blown panic on Facebook or Nextdoor every time they hear a helicopter.
Yes. What they’re saying is that, as long as the computers are working, they should keep the plane flying straight and level even in the absence of a pilot.
Fair enough. But that then suggests the question of why the pilot bailed if his plane was still flying straight and level because the computers were doing their job? I mean, presumably something was going wrong but were things so bad that the pilot needed to eject when he did?
I guess we will not know until a formal inquiry is done (if then).
True.
But I find the auto-eject to be a compelling suspect here.
This was a bigger deal than they let on, I think, if that’s possible. Remember golf celebrity Payne Stewart? He was making a short hop in Florida or something like that, theory is the aircraft didn’t pressurize correctly, all on board passed out due to hypoxia, and it flew on autopilot all the way to South Dakota before it finally crashed.
The tin-foil brigade lurking in the nether regions of the internet posits that the F35 was hacked, and the pilot was ejected remotely, you know, some hacker on the other side of the world. I don’t believe that, or I’d prefer not to anyway. They did ground the entire fleet at least briefly so something ejection seat related may be a possibility.
If only they had listened to Trump, this never would have happened.