Missing F-35 Fighter Jet

The whole JSF program was a debacle from start to finish. I remember watching a documentary about the Boeing prototype going against the Lockheed prototype. The Boeing prototype beat the Lockheed prototype in every KPI, but Lockheed was still awarded the contract despite much worse performance than the Boeing. They should have kept the F-22 for the Air Force and let the Navy (including Marines) field the F-35.

I would think fighter pilots would try to point the plane towards the ocean if they could, before ejecting.

Seriously, no AirTag in that thing?

Maybe they are recovering the pieces from the ocean floor. But they continue the search as a decoy, to make it harder for the Russians/Chinese/etc. to find the recovery site and come snooping around. The Russians never even had jet engines, until Rolls Royce sold them some back in the 50s. They promised not to reverse engineer them, har.

ilbbaicnl According to the article the transponder was not turned on, which is weird. You'd think with a piece of hardware that expensive, it should be on automatically and not need to be turned on manually.

If it's crashing in the ocean, the DoD knows better where to look for it than foreign militaries. An active transponder negates that advantage.

Looks like debris have been located. nbcnews.com

This thing flew for 80 miles before going down for whatever reason. What amazes me is the lack of an encrypted tracker that activates when a pilot ejects. Typically when they eject it's a last second decision before the craft goes down. It flew on its own for 80 miles.

I’d guess that if there’s a tracking device on board it automatically deactivates if the pilot abandons the craft, so as not to make it easy for an enemy to find the aircraft. The fact that they found and recovered the plane, tells us that the knew where to look and how to find it.

The key word mogul used is "encrypted" tracker and he is 100% right. We would want to known exactly where our above top-secret technology is so that we can destroy it quickly were this to happen in an area where it could fall into the wrong hands. It took us 28 hours to find this craft in the contiguous 48 states. When the Nighthawk had been shot down over the Balkans, the Russians and Chinese had been onsite buying and salvaging wreckage much faster than that.

It's also deeply embarrassing that the government actually setup a hotline so civilians can find it for them.

That platform has been cursed by incompetence, mismanagement, and political manipulation from day one. Almost as bad as the Navy's littoral combat ship program.

I don't think encryption helps that much with a transmitter for tracking. If you've got a receiver with directional gain, the tracker shows you the direction of its location, even if you can't decrypt the position data it's transmitting.

Weird story. More to this than what’s being put out in the media. A lot of BS that people may have just swallowed and forgot about in the past. Not anymore.

Reminds me of the Biden Admin trying the “harmless Chinese weather balloon - nothing to see here” story. His allies in the media just couldn’t keep the lid on, although they tried for about a week.