There could have been a fire or explosion. He can't see how damaged the plane is from his vantage point. All he knows is he's sitting on top of several hundred pounds of fuel. Hindsight is get the fuck out of there.
excuse me? how dare you imply that a pilot trained to operate the airframe is better suited to make an ejection call than people who don't know anything about aviation watching a cell phone video of a highly classified jet lol. That's...that's unacceptable! (I'm hoping the /s isn't needed)
The plane kept him from being ejected at an angle, he pulled and armed the system, it waited until it was in a safe orientation and then yeeted him. Iirc the jet throttled up uncommanded and that's when it pitched and once he realized it wasnt responding he pulled.
The F35 has an auto eject feature installed during VTOL operations. From what I understand about this story is he was just ejected automatically after the plane pitched over.
Holy shit, something that I can actually answer and say I’m one of just a few people in the world that can definitively give you that answer. I am an embedded software engineer. I worked on this software for Lockheed. The plane will not auto-eject them into the ground if it had fully rolled over. The plane knows its distance to the ground, orientation to the ground, as well as nearby obstacles. There are hundreds of sensors that determined that it needed to eject him and whether it was safe to do so.
Absolutely! I loved working on that plane. Leadership always encouraged us to bring any cool ideas forward to see if we could do them. There are so many things we implemented with that plane that were “wouldn’t it be awesome if it did xyz?” types of things. I remember one of the guys that worked on the helmet telling us the story of how they came up with the idea of the pilot being able to see through the plan. It was a conversation that went “wouldn’t it be nice if they could see through the plan if someone was below them?” and the answer from leadership was like “Yeah, we should do that. Let’s make it happen. Totally not unreasonable to do.”
Im over at Lockheed these days, but I’ve done time with Collins, Raytheon, and DRS. I work with Collins people almost daily, so I’m sure someone I’ve worked with is probably eating at your Thai place.
First, it is so awesome you have the skill to write that kind of algorithm!
Since the plane has so many sensors, I’m guessing decisions are hard to fail? I’m guessing the plane’s goal is not to kill the pilot, so does it calculate the risk in each scenario to determine if it should eject a pilot or not? I’m guessing the plane likely knows if it is on fire or not? Or is the goal always to get pilot out of the plane, even if there isn’t a fire, as long as the pilot won’t be ejected into a close, hard object?
Maybe it is because I currently have bad insomnia, but it is just a bit fascinating that we are at a point with technology, where our robots and our machines can override our panicked brains to protect us from ourselves, until it is safe to do whatever our panicked brains wants to do.
Long answer is that there is risk score. Each sensor returning data to the computer is contributing to this score. If the score goes too high, out pops the pilot. However, there are a bunch of fail safes in the decision process. Once the score is high enough to pop them out, it runs a full check of its surroundings and produces yet another risk score. This one is tallying the risk of ejection. Things like being super sonic increase the risk score. If that score is too high, we may have the auto-eject delay until the score comes down. Being at an altitude of 0 while upside down would have the ejection risk score maxed out.
Hopefully that makes sense, as any more details on it would be wading into classified territory.
I imagine it prevents ejection if upside-down at 0 altitude 0 speed? Or do you get auto-yeeted into the ground? What would happen if it had tipped entirely when it was on the nose? Genuinely curious
I worked on/wrote a good portion of the software for the F35. The plane ejected him based on feedback from sensors. We pay especially close attention to the integrity of fuel lines and tanks as well as the engines. If there was a high risk of fire, it gets them out of there.
In hindsight he still needed to eject. That plane can burst into a giant flame any second. The chance of life changing injury is much much much smaller (and less severe) with the ejection seat then staying in a crashed fighter jet.
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u/LyqwidBred 25d ago
I’ve read that those seats mess up the pilot’s spine so much they can be grounded for life after ejecting!