USMC F-35B Crash at Miramar - Pilot Ejected.

[IanH755]

Spotted on The WarZone site - https://www.twz.com/air/f-35b-crashes-and-burns-at...

said:

"An F-35B crashed near the runway at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar north of San Diego at around 10:00 AM local time today. The aircraft was seen in helicopter footage from Fox 5 broken into two major pieces and burned.

Marine Corps Air Station Miramar (MCAS Miramar) has issued an official statement, which is as follows:

“Emergency personnel responded this morning to an aircraft mishap on the flightline of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar at approximately 10:00 a.m. local time today, involving an F-35B assigned to Marine Aircraft Group 11, 3d Marine Aircraft Wing.”

“The pilot ejected, was transported to a local medical facility in stable condition for evaluation and treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.”

“More information will be released when available.”

Looks like it came down just short of the runway during a STOVL landing (Upper Lift Fan door is open), with the wreckage being virtually intact (minus a lot of fire damage) and the fuselage broken into two pieces with a 4-6ft gap between the front section (just aft of the Aux Air Inlet doors) and the front fan of the engine. The burnt area extends about 100m behind the jet.

There's some videos in the TWZ news story but they've seemingly been filmed with a 0.1 micro pixel camera and then zoomed in 10000x so its hard to see much detail.

More reports on the story from various sources with some better images than on TWZ -

https://www.marines.mil/News/Press-Releases/Press-...

https://www.military.com/marine-f-35b-crashes-at-m...

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1vby1ut...

https://apnews.com/article/marine-corp-f35-jet-cra...