How many?

[Dbag101]

2 days ago ( so I’m informed ) a USAF F35-A Lightning II crashed, during its approach to Eielson airforce base, in Alaska. The pilot ejected successfully. Martin Baker reckon this is the 7772nd life saved by their ejection seats, and the tenth, from an F35. The F35 hasn’t been in service very long, 10 ejections already, seems like a lot. Are the F35s a bit prone to crashing, in comparison to other aircraft? I’d be looking at the stats a bit carefully if I was anything to do with the procurement processes.

[IanH755]

There's over 1000 F-35's of various models currently flying with around 1,000,000 hours spent in the air and yet there's been just 10 crashes and 1 death.

For military single engine fast jet aviation, thats amazingly low, despite the amount of negative hype about everything "F-35" in the general zeitgeist.

Edited by IanH755 on Thursday 30th January 20:14

[havoc]

IanH755 said:

There's over 1000 F-35's of various models currently flying with around 1,000,000 hours spent in the air and yet there's been just 10 crashes and 1 death.

For military single engine fast jet aviation, thats amazingly low, despite the amount of negative hype about everything "F-35" in the general zeitgeist.

Just googled F16 for comparison (mass-market single-engine fighter):-

c.270 crashes in 17 million hours, so 1 crash every 70k hours, vs 1 crash every 100k hours for the F35 - a c.45% improvement, but that WILL include combat losses. Given the 40 years between the airframe designs, I'm not sure if that's good or not.

Struggling to find similar figures for the Harrier, but it appears to have faired notably worse than the F16, and particularly moreso in USMC ownership than in RAF ownership, allegedly because the USMC didn't really appreciate how unique it was and cut back on maintenance.


I think the real issue is that there is so much more information out there now than there was 20/30/40 years ago. And that the F35 has had its detractors from day-1 who will use anything to slam it. (Typical modern politics, quite frankly - throw mud in the safe knowledge that the facts will be largely lost in the resulting noise)

[aeropilot]

Dbag101 said:

2 days ago ( so I’m informed ) a USAF F35-A Lightning II crashed, during its approach to Eielson airforce base, in Alaska. The pilot ejected successfully. Martin Baker reckon this is the 7772nd life saved by their ejection seats, and the tenth, from an F35. The F35 hasn’t been in service very long, 10 ejections already, seems like a lot. Are the F35s a bit prone to crashing, in comparison to other aircraft? I’d be looking at the stats a bit carefully if I was anything to do with the procurement processes.

I'd be more looking at the pilot training process, more than the procurement process, which to save money is about a much higher percentage of synthetic flying hours (sim training) instead of real flying hours......so is this the driver in these losses rather than a tech problem with the aircraft (other than the UK B loss off the carrier, which was a ground crew foul-up rather than an aircrew one or a failure of the aircraft systems)
The recent loss of a USMC B on take-off, was a clear pilot error, again, a USAF pilot flying a B version, which they don't in service, so did he have enough 'real' hours in a B to be let loose in one?
The other loss of that one where the pilot ejected in bad weather and the aircraft carried on flying for some considerable distance, and couldn't be found for several days, not sure if that was ever put down to pilot error, or a tech fault? Maybe not been made public yet?

[IanH755]

aeropilot said:

ot sure if that was ever put down to pilot error, or a tech fault? Maybe not been made public yet?

The report was released in October last year and can be found as the top entry here on the USMC Reports website (3 parts to D/L).

https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Agencies/USMC-FOIA/FR...

Long story short - yes there were aircraft problems with displays intermittently failing, but the aircraft was still fully flight capable before the pilot ejected. Seems that the pilot didn't use the small "standby" display with attitude etc thats fitted and so, with him having an unreliable "main" display (blinking on/off etc) they decided to eject as they didn't feel that the aircraft was responding to their inputs whilst in bad weather with no visible flight references to judge against - however it was responding, as shown on the ignored standby display.

[Dbag101]

IanH755 said:

The report was released in October last year and can be found as the top entry here on the USMC Reports website (3 parts to D/L).

https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Agencies/USMC-FOIA/FR...

Long story short - yes there were aircraft problems with displays intermittently failing, but the aircraft was still fully flight capable before the pilot ejected. Seems that the pilot didn't use the small "standby" display with attitude etc thats fitted and so, with him having an unreliable "main" display (blinking on/off etc) they decided to eject as they didn't feel that the aircraft was responding to their inputs whilst in bad weather with no visible flight references to judge against - however it was responding, as shown on the ignored standby display.

All glass displays make my sphincter twitch. The F35 is full of glass and not so much ‘hairy arsed’ steam gauges. I can’t see this ending well in the long run, especially as the training ( as mentioned previously) is biased towards sim’s now. I had a conversation with both a F.O. and a P.O. recently, who were adamant that the sim’s were up to the task. I did add my two-penneth about sim’s being ‘arse about face’ in that in real life your arse tells your brain how to react, whereas in a sim, your brain tells your arse what seems to be happening. I’m not sure they had the actual seat hours to understand exactly where I was coming from, and that worries me a bit, and could go some way to explaining the things we are seeing, increasingly, of late. Oh well, not my circus, not my monkeys ( thankfully ).

[aeropilot]

Dbag101 said:

I had a conversation with both a F.O. and a P.O. recently, who were adamant that the sim’s were up to the task.

And they are not going to say otherwise (even if they don't actually believe it)

[Dbag101]

aeropilot said:

And they are not going to say otherwise (even if they don't actually believe it)

Quite. Orders are orders.

[RobbyJ]

How many..... clickbait thread titles, you should be a YouTuber.

[Dbag101]

RobbyJ said:

How many..... clickbait thread titles, you should be a YouTuber.

There’s a thought……………………………………… or maybe not.

[IanH755]

Dbag101 said:

I had a conversation with both a F.O. and a P.O. recently, who were adamant that the sim’s were up to the task. I did add my two-penneth about sim’s being ‘arse about face’ in that in real life your arse tells your brain how to react, whereas in a sim, your brain tells your arse what seems to be happening.

If you split the desired output of our F-35 synthetic trainers into two separate streams then, for the "visual fidelity" side of flying, they really are fantastic in visual quality, systems manipulation etc and they totally fool your brain. The generational "image quality" changes of the outside world with these latest synthetic trainers is something you just have to see in real life to understand just how much better they are than anything previously used (no footage exists to show you, the only footage online is from the press/PR type sim's which aren't even close to a PC game like DCS, nevermind what the our actually look like).

However for the "tactile fidelity" side of flying using the other senses (smell, sound, feel, taste etc) they very obviously don't even come close, and nothing can replicate those aspects of flying, but as an alternative use to just simple "procedures training", if you want to do something bigger like say, practice an attack on something as a multi-aircraft formation multiple times before doing it for real, then the visual fidelity is perfect for that sort of thing with them all being linked.

Here's a little video from the UK MOD's Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S) youtube channel about the use of the synthetic trainers at Marham - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGVC5nhZ4zY

Edited by IanH755 on Sunday 9th February 10:39

[Dbag101]

IanH755 said:

If you split the desired output of our F-35 synthetic trainers into two separate streams then, for the "visual fidelity" side of flying, they really are fantastic in visual quality, systems manipulation etc and they totally fool your brain. The generational "image quality" changes of the outside world with these latest synthetic trainers is something you just have to see in real life to understand just how much better they are than anything previously used (no footage exists to show you, the only footage online is from the press/PR type sim's which aren't even close to a PC game like DCS, nevermind what the our actually look like).

However for the "tactile fidelity" side of flying using the other senses (smell, sound, feel, taste etc) they very obviously don't even come close, and nothing can replicate those aspects of flying, but as an alternative use to just simple "procedures training", if you want to do something bigger like say, practice an attack on something as a multi-aircraft formation multiple times before doing it for real, then the visual fidelity is perfect for that sort of thing with them all being linked.

Here's a little video from the UK MOD's Defence Equipment & Support (DE&S) youtube channel about the use of the synthetic trainers at Marham - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGVC5nhZ4zY

Edited by IanH755 on Sunday 9th February 10:39

That’s interesting. I’m reliably informed that the 2 seater Typhoons are being recommissioned, because too many sprogs have been bricking it, when actually pushed IRL. This isn’t rocket science really. The proof of the pudding is in the actual eating, not the virtual eating. If you’re in charge of an 80-100 million quid asset, you can’t mess around.