F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter uses a specialized hydraulic fluid that’s based on a synthetic ester formulation, not a petroleum-based fluid.

Specifically, it uses phosphate ester–based fire-resistant hydraulic fluid (commonly in the MIL-PRF-83282 or newer MIL-PRF-87257 class).

Apparently the older phosphate-ester based hydraulic fluids were hygroscopic but I'm not sure if the newer variants are.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3ruv-IsGMo

Personally I don’t make a big distinction between crimes against property and crimes against people. I live for my life’s work, if someone destroyed that they might as well have killed me. Additionally many people are dying due to lack of resources, so if someone could be saved for $1M then the destruction of $1M of wealth might has well have killed them. As such I would treat theft and other white collar crime on part with mass murder.

$82.5 million https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45039618

My main disappointment with the F35 is that it could have been a lot cheaper with modern design technology and manufacturing. That and the software is needlessly buggy. I had a friend working on F35 at a time I was working on software quality research, when I discussed the possibility of applying the research to F35 he let me know that bugs were seen as a cash cow and he would be working on bugs on the F35 until he retires. He was right. And now we have stuff like this happening.

Clippy was an assistant, built to help me solve problems I didn't understand, and built to help computer illiterate people use their computers more effectively and was made out of genuine expressions of making their product better for more people.

Notably, most drones have similar levels of control. Everything has to go through the IMU of course (nobody is manually going to be managing 4 separate motor controllers at once), but depending on the modes, the type of control is wildly different.

‘Consumer’/‘idiot’ mode - you tell it which direction to go, and how high/low you want it, and it’ll do that safely. Usually with some sort of object detection/avoidance, auto GPS input, so you won’t accidentally wander into something or hit something. Goal is stable, level flight.

‘Sport’ mode - go fast, usually disables all but the most simple collision avoidance. Sometimes even that. Still provides stable, level flight, but you can easily crash it. Usually goes 2-3x faster than ‘idiot’ mode.

‘Attitude’ or ‘acrobatic’ mode - you’re directly commanding the target 3D pitch/yaw, and aggregate power output. No provision is given to automatically maintaining level flight (won’t auto level), generally no regard is given to airframe integrity, collision avoidance, or engine life, and boy is it fun.

It’s really common to crash in this mode, because people are also doing flips, acrobatic maneuvers, running courses, etc.

Drones in even ‘sport’ mode can’t do flips because it’s fundamentally at odds with auto maintaining level flight, etc.

The F-35 could compare weight on wheels to airspeed as a simple sanity check.

Also the last thing you want in the critical emergency safety gear is more levels of complexity and additional things for the pilot to consider.

It’s a major concern with skydiving too - there are many aircraft it’s impossible to safely exit in flight without impacting some part of the airframe.

In my theoretical, the pilot would safely eject as he did here (or possibly before the touch-and-gos) and the remote control would come into play to try and belly land the plane without it simply becoming a fireball immediately after ejection.

https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3895003/us-a...

Do you expect it would do as well over Ukraine? Or if there was a spat with China over Taiwan (for example)?

It is possible for both things to be true.

The f22 is more elegant though

Consider that what you thought was "received wisdom" was literally Russian propaganda. However, the actual reality was always there, always being patiently insisted by people who knew what they were talking about, who were in fact still discussing actual boondoggles with the program, like the portion of the program that built the tailhook and was terribly run and ineffective at points.

People like Pierre Sprey have been shouting the same lies for decades, and credulous people with zero domain knowledge have been repeating his horse shit forever. He was the same guy who insisted that we should be building really stripped down planes without radar, without missiles, without anything.

He was very much the originator of a lot of anti-F35 FUD, on Russia Today no less. Western media was literally quoting the Russian propaganda firm to tell people how the F35 sucked. He helped push the utter BS that is "Oh, Russia's long wave radar makes stealth not work" which if you don't understand how that's irrelevant and untrue, don't ever have an opinion on modern warplanes.

There's a famous article talking about how terrible the F35 was by interviewing an F16 pilot who had faced it in dogfight training. The article talked at length about how the pilot of the F16 was able to out dogfight the F35. Now, it's sufficient to mention that gun range dogfights are not a thing in modern air combat, or at the very least are not designed for, because as long as your enemy has a single radar or IR missile left, you've already lost. However, beyond that, the F35 wasn't terrible, it's just very unlikely to match the literal king of dogfights. More importantly, the article mentioned something that I'm sure they didn't even realize the importance of.

Even at knife fighting range, the F16 radar assisted gunsight was unable to lock on to the F35. Go look at early jet aircraft gunnery statistics for an idea of how laughably bad dogfighting an F35 would be.

Oh, and that entire test was done with an F35 that wasn't allowed or capable of flying it's full envelope. It was an F35 with a hand tied behind it's back.