The CV of the Boom founder:
Kind of a wild transition. 11 years later, here we are.
Is this the first sign of a Groupon Mafia?
F-35 drops out of the sky. Literally.
Watch the video.
The pilot’s OK.
That must be wild to be hanging under parachute & watch your plane go down like that
Interesting. And expensive. Very expensive.
We can hear the engine running at what I bet is more than idle up until the moment of impact. Yet the airplane has near zero forward airspeed and is tumbling. Given all the FBW & artificial stability, even the absence of a pilot shouldn’t be causing tumbling.
Unless what failed is some aspect of the FBW system or one of the thrusters that provide control and stability at low speed. Which would also be a darn good reason to jump out of the thing.
I do not know at what speeds or altitudes the F-35 does their approaches to vertical landings. Helicopters have the idea of a minimum speed/altitude curve for safe autorotation and try to arrange their descent and slowdown such that they remain fast and/or high enough as late as possible into the maneuver so as to stay in the safe autorotation zone as much as possible.
Clearly F-35s have nothing like autorotation; more like autoplummet as we’ve just seen. But a similar consideration applies to ejecting safely. You want to be high enough and/or fast enough to have time to react & jump out before the jet develops too much sink rate plummet rate and still be high enough to get a safe chute. Yes, zero-zero exists, but as I’ve said many times, that’s a) predicated on zero descent rate, and b) pushing very hard against the “it has to work perfectly or else” barrier. For day to day ops, better to plan more margin.
My WAG is the vid starts with the tumbling airplane at 300-400 feet, and we see the pilot already has a chute with little penduluming. Suggesting the problem started at least a couple hundred feet higher, maybe more.
So, do they routinely fly visual arrivals by slowing to a near stop in level flight at e.g. 1000 feet, then descend substantially vertically from there on pure thrust? Or do they fly a more or less normal looking approach profile towards a runway end but slowing steadily to cross the threshold at e.g. 150 feet and 30 knots, then slow to a stop then descend to touchdown? Or what? I have no idea.
IOW, what were his flight parameters just before the problem began and why were they whatever they were?
Switching back to the Air Busan A321 that burned out, there are now a lot of good pictures available that were taken the next day in daylight. Since wrecks are quickly hidden from public view, we now have access to most of the pictures that will ever be publicly available until the final accident / incident report is published. Air Busan A321 fire - Google Image Search
[Damned Google has “improved” their search urls so I can’t anonymize my search such that you get a fresh search with no connection back to me as the source of where it came from. Bastards.]
The fuselage crown is comprehensively melted off from the forwardmost door to the aftmost door and most of the way down to the window line. With extensive heat damage all the way to the fuselage crown over the cockpit. The wings, engine and landing gear should have salvageable parts. The cockpit & fuselage not so much.
There are also some scary shots of the fire actively burning with flames blazing out of the several long openings in the crown. The fire department is actively hosing the mess down at that point but the interior conditions are obviously far past the unsurvivable stage.
Conveniently they were on the ground and taxiing, but not taking off, when this situation started. So getting word to the cockpit, stopping the jet, recognizing the severity of the situation, and performing an evacuation could be done in just a couple / few minutes.
It will be very interesting to learn how the interaction between cabin, cockpit, and passengers went. In one sense all’s well that ends well, but for legitimate reasons, the process leading up to and well into an evacuation is often more shambolic Keystone Kops than a well-oiled emergency drill.
Interestingly (to me at least), an airliner is in a readily evacuateable (is too a word!) condition once pushed back or while taxiing. While parked at the gate and loading or unloading or even just all locked up and awaiting pushback that is much less true. Learning more about the time course of this fire may be an impetus to rethink some of how we handle door arming and slide operation, and ground servicing with an eye to improving at-gate evacuation cabability.
I am very interested on getting the full report on this one. It could, conceivably, not only alter operations as you mentioned, but also challenge the assumptions used in flammability testing and approvals of materials.
Just as I read the quoted sentence, the story and video came up on the morning news.
As I understand it, the Air Force’s F35As don’t do vertical landing.
…Well, not more than once.
D’oh!!! 
I even noticed the various nozzles and doors needed for vertical lift were in the stowed state. But somehow I locked onto the nil forward speed as being evidence the event started from a near-hover. Those VTOL gizmos weren’t stowed, they were not installed. D’oh!
As you say, that’s impossible more than once. Definitely not a great landing since the airplane isn’t reusable.
Which really leaves me wondering WTF happened. For an ordinary overhead visual approach or even an instrument straight in, the response drill for engine failure is zoom then jump out at or approaching the apex, at whatever altitude that happens to be. Which tends to leave the airplane with not much forward speed as you depart. But we hear the engine running, at least at idle all the way to impact.
Maybe some sort of thrust control or nozzle failure where the engine was running, but producing well less than the thrust needed for continued flight. Or a flight control failure. Or birds or fire or massive hydraulic leak or …
At least the airplane didn’t land on anything else expensive like those tankers or a barracks full of people or …
“Well, I guess I have a couple minutes to spare here…” gets out calculator watch … “Let’s see, base pay minus child support minus retirement plan minus payment plan for F35… shit.”
Here’s CNN’s coverage, including a short (and rather tongue-tied) interview with the base CO.
This may be of interest, as to the new Air Force One jets: Air Force One question - #44 by Elendil_s_Heir
I think we might have discussed that earlier (darn my piss-poor-memory) … but I seem to recall that, using an ejection seat once, you have a decent chance of not flying those birds anymore for health reasons (compression forces of the spine?) … not legal/at fault reasons.
anybody care to weigh in? … seems a bit “overblown” to pass my sniffing-test.
Some fraction of folks are killed ejecting. Or at least don’t survive the experience; which may not be the seat’s fault. it doesn’t come with a money back guarantee. They don’t fly again.
Some fraction are crippled at least bad enough to not fly anything again. That’s better in recent years than, say in the Viet Nam era.
I don’t have hard numbers, but from my ancient memory ISTR maybe a third of ejectees never ride a seat again. Often they can continue flying heavies if they so desire.
For the damaged-spine crowd I don’t know how much the never-again is forced on them by TPTB versus them deciding for themselves. Faced with some flight surgeon saying with some good evidence, “IMO your next ejection will leave you paralyzed or dead. Whaddaya wanna do?” I expect a lot of 25-35yo fighter jocks will decide to hang it up.
Seeing the video of the F-35 crash brings to mind the famous image of the RAF Electric Lightning incident in 1962. The pilot survived but suffered multiple injuries when he crashed through a greenhouse roof and landed in a bed of tomatoes.
Now that’s an example of bailing out with a (probably) large descent rate.
A highly refined crash-by-wire system.
I thought those older heirloom tomatoes (circa 1962) were softer 
Your ejection seat and general area has a dozen or more explosives devices of various sizes. Retracters for belts/harnesses/connectors, shape charge cutters for the canopy or capsule, gas generators for really strong pistons, rocket motors for distance and direction. More devices to blast out your or the seats parachutes. Being blown out of an aircraft isn’t something you practice or simulate. All those explosive pieces are tracked by service life and replaced on a regular schedule. Safety of the pilot is job one.
Looks like there’s been a mid-air collision between a helicopter and passenger jet at Reagan National Airport:
I just came here to post that story as well.
As for ejecting pilots being injured, I have a friend (who fears deportation because she’s a Canadian citizen) whose husband was a paratrooper in the Air Force, and while he never saw a second of combat while he was in the military, is considered something like 50% disabled because of all the damage he did to his lower body in all those parachute jumps.