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Marine Corps orders safety stand-down of all aircraft after F-35 disappearance (nbcnews.com)
37 points by fortran77 on Sept 19, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 54 comments



It should be noted that the debris field was found for the missing fighter jet.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/f-35-fighter-jet-missin...


The article mentions this and makes it quite clear it's not the debris of the f35.

> Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base.

> Two defense officials said Monday that although the jet was on autopilot when the pilot ejected, it does not have the range or ability to fly for such a long period without refueling.


In fact, TFA notes this:

> Officials said Monday evening that a debris field had been located about two and a half hours northeast of the base


Ah yes, the SI unit of distance obviously being the hour. (For an aircraft mishap in particular, this is more ambiguous than usual.)


It was probably written by a reporter based in LA, where we measure distance in hours/minutes.


That seems to be generally a US thing. Many of my colleagues from Texas, Washington and Virginia tell distance in minutes/hours that they (would have) spent driving. It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends". They mean that it depends on the traffic but I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.


I think there's an implicit cultural understanding that when someone here asks how far away something is, what they really want to know is how long it will take them to drive there.


> It's always funny to ask how far away someone lives and they answer "it depends".

I hadn’t noticed that before but I probably will now. That does seem to be a US thing. Often a person will respond in units of distance and time, one after the other. It does make sense given the effect that traffic conditions in a city can have on the travel time but “how far?” “it depends” is really funny.

> I imagine that they live close to an orbiting massive object which curves the space.

My thought was their home is some kind of moving fortress. A city on the back of a turtle wandering along the coast.


IMO this is the case in Texas too and it honestly works a lot better there because in LA an hour is very different at 5PM and 10PM. (Still different in TX cities, but to a lesser extent and for a smaller time period.)


Come to think about it, time vs miles/km feels more natural in most situations I can think of.

In London we would describe a journey based on time (or maybe stops, but only for very short train journeys) not distance.

Same for international travel- measured in flight time not distance travelled.

Because in most situations knowing how far away something is takes second place to knowing how long to get there. That’s what is relevant.

Now as to this crash location, I guess it means 2 hours by car but yeah it’s more ambiguous than a more widely understood journey.


And speed is in football fields per hour?


speed is distance over time, so obviously hours-per-hour.

"Traffic was really bad; we were only going half-an-hour per hour..."

The kids will shorten it in slang to just the unitless dimension. "Rick's car is really fast; we got it up over 2.5 yesterday!"


Oddly enough, household energy consumption is often stated in kWh/year. Being that hours per year is a bit under 10,000 one can convert this kWh/year ridiculousness onto simple W, and the resulting amount is only one order of magnitude different. But I guess it helps people annualize their their electric bill (monthly statements being in kWh) without much math.


In the course of doing some energy improvements (and considering various options), I used the rule of the thumb that 1W continuous costs $2/yr, which was more than close enough mathematically, surely made the math easier to do in my head, and was in the units of the actual tradeoff that I was making (buy an efficiency improvement for $Y, save $Z/yr).


Hours per gallon, actually.


Yes, lol, that ambiguity caught my eye, too. I can't imagine they mean it ended up on the south shore of Newfoundland (2.5 hours NE at Mach 0.85)


The only logical explanation is its about 150 degree minutes.


Two hours is a common unit for storm chasers!


two and a half hours walking? riding a bike? driving in a car? flying in a jet? traveling in the ISS?


Parsecs


Unladen Swallow


if i'm ever in the news i never want the story to be like 'debris field was found'


During the stand-down, Marine commanders will distribute a Xeroxed update to the F-35 flight manual making it clear that autopilot should be disengaged prior to ejection. /s


Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s?

It definitely feels like the F-35 has been plagued by issues for a really long time.


Not really. Large military procurement programs are always a gold-mine for the media, especially those involving new technologies (compared with design iterations). Issues, bugs, production issues, etc are inevitable, and given the large price tag associated with a program like this, the stories are easy to write. The F-35 had it's fair share of these, but now that the program has matured, the incident rate is less than it's contemporaries. It currently has one of the best safety records of US fighter jets. But F-16s don't generate the safe media buzz when they crash.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aerotime.aero/articles/are-...


>Is it just me or are other people also getting completely bonkers ads about the F-35 engine from Pratt & Whitney’s?

Shhh. You're seeing the absurd janky house of cards that the trillion dollar online ad business really is. Their marketing CDP says you're a Pentagon official with purchasing power.


It doesn't need to be perfect to be effective. So what if someone sees the wrong ad even half the time?


"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

Ad tech was supposed to solve this. But the reality is they are selling people a rube goldberg machine that throws darts at a wall, and charging money for it like it's the Oracle of Delphi.


I used to get those ads for them on Twitter (which is one place that would get ads as “sponsored tweets” past uBlock origin). Also all sorts of random stuff, it decided that I was a farmer at some point for some reason (I’m actually an electronics engineer) and I’d get ads for tractors and bulk seed…

I’ve never paid to do any advertising myself but that experience of bizarre misstargeting hasn’t been a good advertisement for the advertisement industry!


You guys are still getting ads?


P&W wants to stop Congress from funding a new engine - as GE has their own design. They want to upgrade the current one, and any other choice would be a victory for commies or something.


This affects all air craft not just the F35

> “During the safety stand down, aviation commanders will lead discussions with their Marines focusing on the fundamentals of safe flight operations, ground safety, maintenance and flight procedures, and maintaining combat readiness,” the statement said.

It is pretty damning and disappointing that this action is warranted. Too much spending on tools and not enough on soldiers.


I don't know why the military can't learn from a string of failed systems going back to at least the '80s.

1. Make Tough Requirements

2. Get Prototype

3. Prototype attracts some interest

4. Now the brass additionally wants capabilities X, Y, Z

5. Prototype now costs twice as much and is more failure prone, and actually less mission-capable due to all the bolt-ons

6. Program costs goes up due to all the changes

7. We can't afford this!

8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50%

9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D?

10. Now we REALLY can't afford this.

11. Cut orders by another 75%

12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge.

13. Program fails in the mid-to-long term due to maintenance costs and falling spares inventory.

HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU


> HBO did a great made-for-TV movie on this called the "Pentagon Wars", which while fictionalized is only about 20% actually made up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir0FAa8P2MU

Great in that it is entertaining, but I would not take it, or the book it was based on, completely at face value:

> The Pentagon Wars was made to be a comedy first and an adaptation of the Pentagon Wars book second. It was never meant to be an accurate portrayal of the Bradley program and it shows. You're getting Hollywood taking an an axe-grinding, half-true memoir as fact and then playing it for laughs.

* https://old.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/erpmjm/having_j...

See also perhaps:

> Although the Bradley destroyed many enemy tanks and experienced fairly low rates of casualty in the First Gulf War and the Iraq War, the vehicle’s recent battlefield performance was not acquired through efficient planning and project management. The origins of the modern Bradley span decades of troubled development; the involvement of many stakeholders; inflexible and questionable requirements; a failure of contractors to make design tradeoffs for fear of losing capability; billions of dollars in R&D costs; and numerous Congressional interventions, including House Armed Service Committee hearings investigating Bradley testing protocol.1 The Bradley has been described at different times, by military officers and historians, as a weapon that means “all things to all people,” a “quintessential hybrid,” and “a proverbial camel...that does nothing well”.2

* https://user.eng.umd.edu/~austin/enes489p/lecture-resources/...


> 7. We can't afford this!

> 8. Cut unit acquisitions by 50%

> 9. Wait? Our unit cost just nearly doubled because the real costs were all in design/R&D?

> 10. Now we REALLY can't afford this.

> 11. Cut orders by another 75%

> 12. So finally approximately 10% of the original order actually gets built, at a total program cost 2 or 3x what it was supposed to be, and a unit cost that's massively huge.

Oh they've learnt from that well enough. Why do you think we're ordering so many thousands of F-35s? They've kept the unit cost perfectly on-budget! Just don't ask about the total program cost.


As much as I love the entertainment value of The Pentagon Wars, citing that as a source for procurement problems is not great. It's a lot more than just 20% made up, and the parts that are true (i.e. the live fire test shenanigans) are true in that wonderful way that something can be technically correct while also being entire bogus.

The Bradley was designed as an IFV from the ground up, not a bastardized APC. The Bradley came in under budget. Those two facts invalidate essentially the entire film...


This is mostly just how the Marine Corps fixes fuckups. LCpl Schmuckatelli gets one hooker pregnant and suddenly the entire battalion has their 96 canked, we’re all having 0700 safe-sex safety briefings Saturday morning, and Doc is handing out condoms.


Isn't it bad opsec for this to be public knowledge?


For any threat that considers the flight routines of the military, they assuredly have intel that will make them aware of this. Even down to a source by a base saying "huh, no flights took off today, odd."


Is it possible that the ejection mechanism malfunctioned and ejected the pilot from a perfectly working airplane? Has such a thing happened before?


Not exactly that, but the Cornfield Bomber [0] is sort of similar to that idea. The pilot ejected (intentionally) in a spin, but the changed center of mass leveled the plane out and it flew until it eventually landed itself in the namesake field. They knew what happened immediately in that case, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber



Is it possible plane was hijacked? Ejected the pilot, landed somewhere on remote control and was quickly packed into couple of trucks. Now that would be something, mother of all supply attacks!

https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pentagon-...

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/09/13...


Politicians need to communicate that an iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 50 of them, and they still have bugs.

It costs money to keep a supply chain going for rare items.

Maybe a smarter approach is to build broadly useful factories that can switch on a dime during times of war, but no one has figured that out.

The thing about expensive tech that gives you an advantage is that random consumers can’t afford it.


We have been running military operations nonstop for practically 40 years.

Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together.

There is little functional or healthy about the current state of affairs.


Most of the US military budget is directly related to labor costs. US labor is extremely expensive in all regards, on par with some of wealthiest nations in Europe.

If you properly adjust for that fact - basically do some manner of reasonable PPP adjustment - China is already spending on par with or more than the US at this point.

The reason the US military budget is seemingly so massive, is because the US economy has such an extreme output per capita, at present ~$80,000 (Britain + Japan combined). Astronomical for a nation so large. ~3% of $27 trillion is not unreasonable for a superpower with global interests. Russia has given us a demonstration, again, that we in fact do need that military capability. China will probably provide another.


>Our military budget is the size of the next 12 countries put together.

That's because we practically subsidize the majority of our allies' militaries.


That’s the quiet part we don’t want to say out loud- the rest of the western world effectively gets a free pass on military spending at our expense.


"we" == US?


Damn sounds like someone is losing their wings.


Nope. You can eject from 2 aircraft before the military takes away your keys.


But usually they don’t sit everyone down because of it. Unless it’s maybe something critical they think could be impacting the entire fleet. I’m so curious.


That’s for health reasons, no? As your spine should not be subjected to a third ejection at that point.

They may take yours wings for cross negligence any time.


I wonder what the furthest an abandoned aircraft has glided before crashing.




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