Breaking- F-35 down at Hill AFB-Oct 2022

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: ElitePlebeian

MANPADS are only effective at low level. The highest altitude a MANPADS can reach up to is about 13,000 feet. The F-35 and other aircraft, using PGMs will remain well above MANPADS altitude.

Ah ok thx for educating me. But probably they will still be a big problem for other aircraft right? I mean why are the Russian flying that low then? Pretty sure they have kind of similar flight and weapon specifications?

Also helicopters will be very vulnerable..

a reply to: ElitePlebeian

Fights like this are going to hammer precision guided weapons supplies, meaning they're going to have to revert to older weapons. For improved accuracy they're going to have to get close, unless they want to just lob them into the area, and risk missing the target. That's what happened to Russia, and what will happen to the US in a large fight. Contrary to what people said, Russia didn't run out of PGMs, but their supplies were hit hard enough that they were using S300s in their secondary ground attack roles in the recent missile strikes.

The aircraft was tail number 15-5197. The mission that day was a Flight Lead Upgrade Sortie to the Utah Test and Training Range. The MF was a four ship, with the MA being #3. Upon returning to Hill, the MF received updated weather, including that wake turbulence procedures were in effect, but did not pass on wake turbulence information. The MP failed to follow wake turbulence procedures, and during the landing the MP felt a slight bump from wake turbulence of the aircraft ahead of him. After the bump, the MA stopped responding to control inputs. The MP, recognizing that the aircraft wasn't responding properly selected afterburner in an attempt to go around, but the aircraft went out of control, and the MP initiated ejection.

After approximately three seconds of turbulence, the MP received an AIR DATA DEGD ICAW. At approximately the same time, he noticed that the aircraft was not responding correctly, and selected afterburner to go around and try again. The aircraft rolled left after selecting afterburner, with the MP selecting full right roll to counter the left roll. Approximately 10 seconds after entering the wake turbulence the MP ejected from the aircraft.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: madmac5150

Bird strike is my first guess. It would be right around the time birds would be heading home for the night.

Could be possible with a very big bird - when it was JSF (2001) it was built to withstand a frozen chicken fired out a cannon and had a few design features to make it still able to fly and supply accurate data to the pilot if the jet suffered significant damage.

May have changed after then but it's a very safe aircraft and has incredibly powerfull abilities.

Edit: Just seen your above post - possibly a case of flutter from the turbulence but again it has a lot of design features to stop/minimise- is this more likely to be a mistake from ground crew/maintainance than the design itself?

Was involved in the UK design of JSF/F35 jet engine design and devoloping models to wire all the electronics effectively and so ground crews could have easy access to inspect/repair the wiring but have no idea about the US side of things or changes post 2003.

a reply to: bastion

It’s a one in a million fluke. The left sensors underwent a pressure drop that put them out of limits and caused the computer to stop recognizing them until they were back in limits. At the same time, the right sensors were intermittently dropping out. The computer was using calculations based on previous readings and ended up with a 40 degree difference between what it thought the AoA was, and the actual AoA. A test pilot saw the crash and said the flight controls were moving at their limits, and the aircraft reached a point where even if the controls were responding there was no possible way to recover the aircraft.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Thanks for the info, I wasn't sure if the left/right thing was public domain but all jets/planes I've heard of have that feature apart from Boeing 737 MAX which has no backups to save money and is a complete death trap and terrible design IMO and I'd never step foot in one.

That is a crazy fluke and the pilot must have known that aircraft inside out to eject. I can see why the computer got so confused now and this was a situation isn't meant to occur unless it's hit by a few missiles or anti-aircraft fire.

It's not my area at all but 40deg difference sounds a huge miscalculation - is it common for other jets to experience that high a miscaculation when going into a crash or is this an exceptionally large one?

a reply to: bastion

This one was pretty huge. It looks like the calculations made were made with bad data, probably from the right sensor as it was dropping out. Previous F-35s had flown through wake turbulence with zero issues, and worldwide the fleet has flown over 600,000 hours. This is the first incident involving wake turbulence.

As for the Max, what was left out of all the articles about them is that the pilots in both of the crashed flights made mistakes that contributed to the accidents. I’ve flown on them several times and they’re actually a pretty nice flight.