We've Got an Explantion for How the US Lost an F-35: It's Being Blamed on the Weather

Shutterstock Images.

As you grow up, it's only natural to assume that the people in charge of all the most important stuff are up to the job. Starting with your parents, who always seemed to be good at their jobs and knew exactly what they were doing when it came to raising you and taking care of the house. Ending with the people running all the complex systems we all rely on. The government, energy, transportation, emergency responders, infrastructure, and of course, the military. To have any faith in our system, you need to believe that the people operating our most sophisticated equipment are Maverick in the cockpit of a 5th generation aircraft, and not John Winger and Russell Ziskey driving the EM-50 into Czechoslovakia. 

But once you reach adulthood, you start to realize a lot of them are just faking it. Partly because you realize you're faking it at your job half the time too. Those people you knew as kids who never seemed to have the first clue about anything also grow up, get diplomas, find jobs, and keep making the same stupid mistakes they in school and boneheaded errors they made in Little League. 

Advertisement

By way of example, back at the end of the 1990s, NASA launched a space probe that was supposed to study the atmosphere of Mars. The mission ended up earning a reference in the Jimmy Buffett (RIP) song "Fruit Cakes" after it went missing, either burning up in the atmosphere or missing Martian orbit altogether. The cause? NASA did all their calculations in metric units, and builder Lockheed Martin was using US measurements. The whole project cost $327 million in '90s dollars. 

So when the single most advance fighter ever built and one that our four branches of our military are depending upon going forward goes missing and eventually crashes:

… we just naturally assume there had to be some extraordinary circumstance to cause such a catastrophic failure. Guess again:

Source - The pilot who ejected from a $100 million F-35 fighter jet claimed to have lost the plane in the weather — and likely bailed out before he could activate its tracking system, sources and experts said.

“He’s unsure of where his plane crashed, said he just lost it in the weather,” a voice can be heard saying of the pilot on a Charleston County Emergency Medical Services call posted Tuesday by a meteorologist. …

Military officials have not yet released a specific reason for the pilot’s hasty exit, only referring to the incident as stemming from a “malfunction.”

To be clear, I'm not judging. Nobody's perfect. Last year I did the Park & Ride thing at Logan Airport and lost the ticket that had my parking space number on it. So I had to have the shuttle bus driver go in circles while I pressed the key fob and listened for the car horn. These things happen to the best of us. 

In fact, I respect this pilot's explanation. Humans have been using the weather as an excuse for as long as we've had weather. It's as old as "I'm not hunting caribou today because the thunder god is angry" and as contemporary as "I'm late because nobody knows how to drive in the snow." Let ye who never once claimed to lose sight of a fly ball because the sun was in your eyes cast the first stone. So let's not blame the pilot. Let's instead as that when the people in charge sink 100 million bucks into one plane (I heard the pilot's helmet alone cost $40,000), that they make it so you can fly and track the thing in a rainstorm. Maybe put the Lockheed Martin version of an Apple Air Tag on it. Or an actual Air Tag, since they go for about 30 bucks and the Pentagon will end up paying $3 million for one. 

Advertisement

Anyway, congratulations are in order for the powers that be solving this mystery, using the oldest excuse in the book.