F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before fighter jet crashed in Alaska
A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes during a conference meeting with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with a fighter plane before flying. plunged on the ground Earlier this year in Alaska, an accident report published this week.
28 January accident at the Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks A video This showed that the plane fell down and exploded in a fire ball. The pilot safely removed, was only subjected to minor injuries, but the $ 200 million fighter aircraft was destroyed.
An Air Force investigation blamed the accident on the hydraulic lines in the nose and the F-35’s main descent gears, which prevented them from being properly distributed.
According to the report, the pilot tried to withdraw the landing equipment after taking off, but he wouldn’t do it completely. When downloading again, it is not centered by locking an angle on the left. The attempts to correct the landing teams caused him to think that the fighter plane was on the ground, and ultimately caused an accident.
After passing through the system checklists to solve the problem, the pilot made a conference meeting with engineers from Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the aircraft while flying near the air base. The report participated in the report, including a senior software engineer, flight security engineer and three experts in Landing Gear Systems.
Aircraft assigned to the 25th Fighter fleet taxi during exercises at the Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska. – Press Wire Service/Shutterstock
In the report, the pilot then tried two “touch and go” descents where the plane descended shortly, trying to correct the stuck nasal gear.
However, these attempts could not make the nasal wheel newly, and both left and right main descent gears freezes and could not fully reach out to a real descent.
At this point, F-35’s sensors said that this is on the ground and that the jet computer systems have switched to “automatic ground operation mode”.
This caused the fighter plane to be “uncontrollable, because it was öt operates as if he were flying, and forced the pilot to remove it.
Investigation of the debris of the aircraft found that approximately one -third of the fluid was water in hydraulic systems of both nose and right main descent gears.
The investigation found a similar hydraulic icing problem in another F-35 during the nine-day flight after the accident, but this plane was able to land without incident.
In the report, Lockheed Martin says that F-35’s sensors give guidance about the problem that a care bulletin has in an extremely cold weather in April 2024 about nine months before the accident. The problem, “the pilot can make it difficult for the plane to control,” he said.
In the report, he said that the temperature was -1 degrees Fahrenheit during the accident.
The conference interview said that if the participants referred to the 2024 maintenance bulletin, he said, “Probably, he would recommend a controlled ejection rather than a complete stop descent or a second touch”, which led to the conditions causing the accident.
CNN reached Lockheed Martin to comment on the Air Force Report.
The Air Accident Accident Investigation Board concluded that the decision -making decision making a crew, including those involved in in -flight conferences, was a lack of “dangerous material program supervision” that controls the storage and distribution of hydraulic fluid and does not follow the aircraft hydraulic service procedures appropriately.
Create an account for more cnn news and newsletter Cnn.com
