F-35 Down (or missing?) in South Carolina?

Depending on how the jet was disabled, it might be able to fly a long way before crashing. It might not have responded to control by the pilot, but could still have kept going till it ran out of fuel. This happens sometimes with commercial jets and even airplanes, it could be a hundred miles or more from where the pilot bailed out. I should go check the back of my land, maybe it could travel five hundred miles. I doubt that, but if there is a jet here, I am not going to say squat to anybody, it is a nice souveneir. Just think how much it would bring up my property value, one of those jets cost a lot of money.

I suppose it was running stealth...radar couldn't detect it to tell where it came down. I would guess within a hundred miles max, depending on what went wrong with it. It could have shot up at an angle and gone for a while. Out of fuel, it would not even start a fire. It is probably in one of those lakes though I would guess. They have a transponder in them for tracking, but that might have gotten damaged. It could have even turned around and flew fifty miles backwards and be in the woods in the opposite direction

I don't know if some of you guys know about how those systems work, and again, it is probably highly classified, it could have been set or altered to some sort of autopilot system when the pilot bailed.

japan is now building missile sites on their islands.
There is a reason for that.
China still believes that the Okinanan Islands belongs to them , Study their history.

FOXX840, the C-12 that was involved in the search apparently found it in Williamsburg County. ATC asked if they found it, and they reported the "may or may not have found it. There's not much left."

originally posted by: VulcanWerks

originally posted by: Zaphod58
They looked at the radar data, and are concentrating the search around a couple of lakes north of Charleston.

Any indication as to why the pilot ejected?

computer glitch in the right engine? flame out?

solar batteries ran out? gen X pilot?

It’s possible that the pilot flew into a developing mesocyclone.

interesting reporting @ www.dailymail.co.uk...

SC weather conditions kinda normal, uncommon twisters arrive but no micro-bursts appear

the Daily Mail states hackers can/do harass the F35B (and other aircrafts) since 2019-to-present

a reply to: St Udio

Yes, because the Daily Mail is such a bastion of great journalism.

Does this look like "normal weather"? Looks pretty nasty to me. Twisters don't just arrive. They have to be generated from bad weather.



Hacking ALIS would be a concern, if they still used ALIS and hadn't switched away from it because of unrelated issues.

originally posted by: St Udio


interesting reporting @ www.dailymail.co.uk...

SC weather conditions kinda normal, uncommon twisters arrive but no micro-bursts appear

the Daily Mail states hackers can/do harass the F35B (and other aircrafts) since 2019-to-present

The hacking issue has been known for some time.

Now my question is this…

Did the pilot decide to eject, or did the plane eject him?

My spidy senses are tingling with this situation. There is absolutely more to this story.

a reply to: St Udio

Also - how the hell did it take 28 hours to find this thing when it crashed into a neatly plowed field and you can see multiple driveways around the site.

Did the farmers just think that massive explosion that put a hole in their field was just a big cow fart?

Farmers are “rural” so they didn’t hear or see anything?

This whole thing stinks.

a reply to: VulcanWerks

It didn't crash into a newly plowed field, it crashed into a pretty heavy copse of trees. It was near a farmers field, but it was hidden pretty well. You can see in the videos where the trees were burned and knocked down.

a reply to: VulcanWerks

The problem with hacking ALIS is that the F-35 has been moving away from ALIS and replacing it with a new, improved system that's almost totally different, that does the same thing.

You can keep saying "this stinks" but it really doesn't. There's nothing about this that doesn't make sense or seems fishy so far.

I've read all through this Post multiple times now because I'm at a loss as to what Happened and now the Consensus is the Plane was possibly Hacked ?

Okay Granted the F-35 is a Purely Digital Aircraft and there are 1million+++ things that could have gone wrong . The Plane was on Auto-Pilot when the pilot ejected so it is an original Idea that someone hacked the planes systems and Ejected the Pilot . Actually now that I think about it that is hilarious to even imagine.

That being said there are two things being over-looked in this OP .

1. Why on Earth did it take days to find this aircraft ? There had to be I say again there HAD TO BE A TRANSPONDER on the aircraft for locating the aircraft in the event of a crash. A Transponder that would have been manufactured to fully survive the Aircraft crashing.

2. This is the one people are really not wanting to acknowledge , This was clearly Pilot Error . Who ever was flying the F-35 made some sort of error and panicked and then Ejected from the Aircraft . End of story when a human being is involved and something goes wrong you can bet 99% of the time it was the Human Being that caused the Error. Marine Pilots are notorious for crashing Aircraft's of every variety.

a reply to: asabuvsobelow

1. The "transponder" to find a crashed aircraft is an ELT. It stays in the ejection seat to find the pilot. Finding the pilot is a bigger priority than finding the plane. The IFF transponder was probably damaged in the ejection from all the damage done to the cockpit and electronics in that area during the ejection. The weather was nasty at the time of the ejection (see my above post) so it was really easy to not see where the aircraft went, and the wingman was too busy trying to check on the pilot that ejected and making sure he was ok. There's video of the crash site, and there is nothing even remotely recognizable as being an aircraft that can be seen in the short video. You can clearly see that something crashed there, based on the trees and burned area, but the plane was totally destroyed. There are almost certainly some decent sized pieces left, they just haven't been shown yet.

2. It may have been pilot error, but there was nasty weather, including some that could send an aircraft out of control if it hit unexpectedly. The F-35A crash in Utah was caused by the aircraft going through wake turbulence and causing the computer to flip its lid. It could have been something similar here, and after the pilot ejected the change in weight and balance and aerodynamics from the canopy being gone altered things enough that it was able to recover and fly for a few more miles before crashing.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
FOXX840, the C-12 that was involved in the search apparently found it in Williamsburg County. ATC asked if they found it, and they reported the "may or may not have found it. There's not much left."

They found pieces.
I drove right by it on my way to and from work Monday and never noticed anything.
I have spoken to folks that live close to the area and they never heard a "boom" or anything. One or two did say they heard an abnormal sounding Jet Sunday and some folks in the area lost electricity.

a reply to: asabuvsobelow

Well let's see. The transponder could have been damaged during the ejection. It could have been destroyed when the plane dug a hole in the ground. One of the problems with a plane like the F-35 is the flight control system. It relies on sensors to determine the airspeed, altitude, attitude and other parameters. Little things like bird strikes, possibly icing and other things can either disable these sensors or cause them to give erroneous readings. One of the 737 MAX crashes a few years ago was because a bird flew into the Angle of Attack sensor.

In Civil and General Aviation the majority of crashes are caused by human error. Military aircraft, not so much.

a reply to: Zaphod58
I know that you are knowledgeable on such but to this old engineer EVERYTHING about it looks fishy
I was on the design and implementation team for the F16 voice command system so I am somewhat familiar with flight interfaces and controls
If the plane was no longer airworthy the how did it manage to continue to fly at length with an empty cockpit?
If the multiple computer systems were so compromised that the pilot could not maintain control why did autopilot not have any problem continuing on some route?
Now it is reported that they located a "debris field" they believe is related to the missing aircraft
Our planes no longer seem to crash in fireballs with a lot of wreckage but totally disintegrate with only minor flotsam and jetsam left over
There appears to be some charring but certainly no evidence of a fireball (assuming that most of the fuel was either expended or the pilot managed to purge most of what was left)
Apparently the world where we could make calculations based from onboard fuel, know altitude and heading and perhaps weather conditions and could come up with a pretty darn good guess of where this thing would come down no longer applies!
Didn't we did land on the moon with little more than TI-84 calculating abilities! How far the mighty have fallen!

originally posted by: asabuvsobelow

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: TheGoondockSaint

Stand downs happen after accidents. There have been several in the last year alone. You left out that is for Marine F-35 units not the entire military.

I've nothing against the Marine Corp , They are an Excellent Fighting force Highly motivated and disciplined and of course absolutely in love with themselves .

Personally I think The Marine Corp should step away from Jets.

Bite your tongue

a reply to: amicusbrief

There have been many aircraft that were at the point of ejection and no longer airworthy, that proceeded to fly on after the pilot punched out. The two most well known were the Cornfield Bomber, where the pilot ejected from an F-106 that was in a flat spin. He tried everything, including deploying the drag chute, and couldn’t recover, so he ejected. After ejection the aircraft stabilized, and proceeded to fly on land in a farmers field near by. The engine ran for 45 minutes until it ran out of fuel.

The other widely known one was in 1989. A MiG-23 took off from an airfield in Poland. Shortly after takeoff the pilot had afterburner problems, leading to him ejecting from the aircraft. It proceeded to fly 600 miles from the point of ejection, eventually running out of fuel and crashing in Belgium.

There are a surprising number of others, but those are the two most widely known. It has happened many times, and I’m sure it will happen again in the future. The change in weight, and aerodynamics sometimes causes the aircraft to recover enough to fly on shortly until it crashes.

Our aircraft disintegrate because of the larger amounts of composites involved in construction and in this case the RAM. It tends to burn hot and long, reducing things that can be reduced further.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Can you talk more about the composite skins on the f35? I am interested in its material construct, I have recently been promoted so to speak as the new QC/QA inspector at my machine shop and have been doing lots of extra curricular study and reading into all kinds of things that include delving into aircraft and aerospace/ aeronautical materials etc.

a reply to: Brotherman

The skin is one of the most guarded secrets around. They won’t even let the F-117s going to museums keep their leading edges, or skin. If you see one in a museum, it has wooden leading edges, and is just painted black.