The USMC Found the Strayed F35B

   

While the aircraft was missing, the blogosphere was aflame with rumors that Xiden had "sold" another secret to the Red Chinese, it was "Deja Vous" with the notorious balloon incident all over again.  I personally didn't buy it(Get the pun), but it wouldn't surprise me if the CCP activated assets to try to find the plane before the Americans did to pilfer its "black boxes" and other secrets before it was found by us and scarfed up and sent to a military base.

     I got this article from a 3rd party that I got in my work email and the following article came off my blog.

Credit: U.S. Marine Corps

A frantic search for a missing F-35B whose pilot safely ejected ended late on Sept. 18 after U.S. military officials discovered a debris field in a remote area of South Carolina. 

The roughly 28-hr. search for the Lockheed Martin-made stealth fighter included an unusual request to the public for any tips on the F-35B’ss whereabouts and prompted the U.S. Marine Corps to announce a two-day aviation standdown to review safety procedures.

 The pilot was found on South Kenwood Avenue on the afternoon of Sept. 17 after ejecting less than a mile from the runway at Charleston International Airport, local news reports say. The pilot was transferred to a local hospital in stable condition, according to a statement by Joint Base Charleston. 

But the aircraft continued flying in a northeasterly direction until finally crashing about “two hours northeast of Joint Base Charleston” in Williamsburg County, South Carolina, the Marine Corps said in a statement. If the hourly measurement referred to a driving distance, that would have put the debris field in the far northeastern corner of Williamsburg County.

Until the crash location was discovered, however, military officials faced the unlikely security threat of a missing advanced weapon system with several classified technologies onboard. In a sign of the military’s desperation for clues, Joint Base Charleston published a public plea for tips within an hour of the pilot’s ejection.

“If you have any information on the whereabouts of the F-35 that would help the recovery team, please call the JB Charleston Base Defense Operations Center,” the base said on a social media channels.

More than an hour after releasing the initial statement, the base released a quick update that narrowed the search for the F-35B to a remote, boggy area north of Charleston.

The F-35B belonged to the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing’s Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501, which is based at Marine Corps Base Beaufort, South Carolina.

In a statement, the wing said the incident was under investigation and since it is ongoing, additional details would not be releasable “to preserve the integrity of the investigatory process.”

Following the incident, Marine Corps Acting Commandant Gen. Eric Smith ordered the two-day pause in operations. During the stand down, aviation commanders are directed to discuss safe flight operations, ground safety, maintenance and flight procedures with their Marines.

The stand down comes less than a month after Smith ordered a review of safety policies and procedures after an MV-22 Osprey crashed during a training exercise in Australia, killing five Marines.

The wing suffered another F-35B crash in 2018 due to a manufacturing flaw in a fuel tube, but the pilot safely ejected.

If an aircraft is equipped with an ejection seat, the location of the crash site is normally proximate to where the ejected pilot lands. But there have been cases where an aircraft continued flying for hundreds of miles after the pilot ejected.

In 1989, for example, a Soviet Air Force Mikoyan MiG-23 crashed in Belgium, but that was 600 mi. from where the pilot ejected over Poland. The pilot ejected after the afterburner failed and the aircraft began descending, but after his ejection the engine kept running and the aircraft continued flying on autopilot.

     Here is the article about the Mig 23 the article was referring to, I had blogged about it back in 2017

I remember this incident once I read of it, I was stationed in Stuttgart and we heard of this on AFN  and the Stars&Stripes newspapers had stories about it.  I remembered commenting back then if this caused concerns on the regimental net for the 11th ACR that had people always patrolling the 1KM zone between East and West Germany.  I went and looked up some stories about it Here, Here,and Here.   

July. 4 1989, Independence day for the Americans, was not an especially exciting day for the 32^nd TFS (Tactical Fighter Squadron) also known as ‘Wolfhounds’ then based in Soesterberg, Netherlands.
When two very competitive pilots J.D Martin and Bill Murphy were scrambled, they were not expecting that their independence day flights would be to intercept and possibly engage a very strange Soviet MiG.
On the same day, Soviet Pilot Nikolai Skurigin prepared his MiG-23M for a routine training flight. When Skurigin’s MiG took off from Kolobzreg, Poland, the pilot had no clue what was about to happen to his aircraft.
Soon after taking off Skurigin realized that MiG’s engine had a major failure and that aircraft was going to crash in few seconds, so he did what every pilot is trained to do in such situations, he abandoned the aircraft and ejected.

A MiG 23, in flight with pilot

While descending in his parachute, Skurigin realized that something peculiar had taken place; his MiG was actually gaining height instead of loosing it and worse, it was heading straight towards NATO airspace.

The flight of the MiG

On the other side, JD and Murphy after being sent to intercept a Russian plane that had invaded their air space, had problems of their own; they were having some major communication issues with Ground Control Intercept
Despite these difficulties, the two pilots got closer to the ‘rogue’ aircraft and discovered that not only the MiG was unarmed it was also unmanned. This posed another challenge to the pilots and ground control since the aircraft was now considered not an immediate threat.
US Air Force pilots in their F-15s escorted the Soviet MiG until it reached the 39,000ft mark, after that aircraft started descending possibly due to low fuel levels.

The crash site as seen from above

When the aircraft started descending, pilots with the help from the ground predicted that it would land somewhere near Lille, on the border of Belgium and France. Later on, the calculation showed that it would rather crash in an empty field inside Belgium, and was coded as ‘non risky’.
But the calculations could not predict what actually happened when Soviet MiG crashed in a farm killing an 18-year-old boy.

What was left of the MIG

Clearly an avoidable causality on the part of both Soviets and Americans, both nations showed genuine regret on the outcome of the incident. When Colonel Skurigin discovered about the death of the Belgian boy by his MiG, he publicly showed regret for his decision to eject out of the aircraft.
The Belgian government made a formal protest to the Soviet Union regarding the lack of notification as to the danger the aircraft posed to the civilian population. Belgian Foreign Minister Mark Eyskens expressed concern that “from the time the MiG-23 was first picked up on NATO radar to the time it crashed more than an hour later, no word of warning came from the Soviet side,” and that “there was also a ‘notable slowness’ on the part of the Soviets in disclosing whether the jet was carrying nuclear or toxic weapons.”
The USSR paid $685,000 in compensation to Belgium.

Asiana and Boeing argue over blame for the Asiana 777 crash

As people know that have been reading my blog for a long time, know that I work in the aviation industry and I do like airplanes.  The Boeing 777 has an enviable safety record.  I don't like working on them out of personal preference, the airplane is a great airplane, and it is a BIG airplane and to work on it, basically involves tall ladders or man lifts.  I am an older person and not as limber as I once was and climbing up and down ladders after a while gets telling on the body so I tend to work the narrow bodies( MD-88's, 737's, 757's and Airbus 320 series aircraft.)  They are lower to the ground and to an older person...That ain't a bad thing. 
     I was reading from Aviation week and ran across this article and I figured I would post it along with some pictures I "googled" on the internet.  since I am a simple person and I like pictures.   I am a visual kind of guy.    What I got off this article is that the lawyers are posturing again,   and nothing is said about the culture in the cockpit.  Anybody that works in the aviation industry will know what I am talking about. 

April 07, 2014
Credit: NTSB

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board might be six months from declaring the probable cause and contributing factors in the Asiana Airlines 777-200ER crash in San Francisco last July, but two main participants in the investigation, Asiana and Boeing, have already formed their own conclusions.

In documents submitted to the NTSB and published on March 31, both the airline and the manufacturer contend that a basic lack of monitoring and failure to follow airline and industry standards for abandoning an approach led the pilots into a situation where airspeed and altitude were too low to avoid crashing into the sea wall in front of Runway 28L, but the agreement stops there.
Asiana says its pilots were blindsided by lack of a timely low-speed aural alert and an autopilot flight-director system mode—flight-level change (FLCH)—that is inconsistent with practically all other modes in that it allows the autothrottle to go into a “hold” mode with engines at idle and no low-speed “wake-up” to prevent the aircraft from flying too slowly. Boeing, however, says the 777 and its automation systems and training materials were not at fault in the crash, but rather the pilots were not adept at visual approaches and did not take advantage of several opportunities to abandon the unstable arrival before it was too late. Asiana provides 11 recommendations in its submittal; Boeing offers none.
It is unclear how any of the posturing could influence the NTSB's determinations on the accident, or any of the more than two dozen civil lawsuits filed in the weeks after the crash, actions that blame both Asiana and Boeing for the accident. Given the potential liability in admitting to deficiencies while cases are ongoing, it is not surprising that Boeing is not offering recommendations on how to improve its aircraft, even if the company is internally contemplating changes to low-speed alerting systems or modifications to the autothrottle logic. Changes to the 737NG autothrottle and low-speed alerting systems, both of which played a role in the crash of a Turkish Airlines 737-800 crash in Amsterdam in February 2009, took more than three years to reach the fleet, either in the form of a service bulletin or an airworthiness directive.
In the meantime, Boeing is staunchly defending the 777 FLCH mode, noting that aircraft equipped with the mode have performed 55.6 million successful landings, which it says equates to more than three landings per minute, every minute of every day for the past 32 years. FLCH is normally used for changing altitudes in cruise by selecting the mode and entering the target altitude on the mode control panel.
In the San Francisco crash, Boeing says the pilots “erroneously” pushed the FLCH mode button at 1,600 ft. while descending on autopilot toward the runway, causing the autopilot to climb toward a preset altitude of 3,000 ft. that had been set in case of a missed approach. The pilot-flying in the left seat, who was completing his transition training to become a 777 captain after flying the A320 as a captain for five years, turned off the autopilot and pulled the throttles to idle thrust to descend, an action that in FLCH mode puts the autothrottles in “hold.” On the flight deck, a green box in the flight-mode annunciator area of the primary flight displays would have highlighted the word “Hold” for 10 sec.; but no associated audible announcement would have cued the pilots to the mode change. In interviews, the pilots said they had assumed the autothrottle would have maintained the 137-kt. approach speed they had set in the mode control panel, despite their having had recent training in the nuances of FLCH.
Regardless of the mode, Boeing says, the crew failed to monitor airspeed, thrust and altitude to verify a stable arrival.

“At 500 ft., the approach was not in compliance with the industry-standard stabilized approach criteria for sink-rate and thrust settings,” states chief engineer for air safety investigation Michelle Bernson in the Boeing submission. “A go-around should have been initiated.” Below 500 ft., she states, there were “numerous clues”—visual and tactile—that showed the aircraft's speed was decaying, the aircraft's thrust setting was incorrect, and the aircraft was increasingly below glidepath. The aircraft ultimately slowed to 103 kt., well below its 137-kt. target speed before the pilots attempted a go-around.
Thomas Haueter, a technical consultant for Asiana, says the automation design, combined with the high workload approach, may have been an accident in waiting. “You're in a situation where the autothrottle does not wake up to the set airspeed and it does not wake up as you get near stall,” he says. Haueter, veteran NSTB investigator who retired in 2012, says none of the three pilots on the flight deck remembers pushing the FLCH button on the mode control panel, although Boeing notes the cockpit voice recorder captured “sound of click” at the same time the flight data recorder shows the FLCH mode activated, confirming “that the button was pushed.”
Boeing questions the pilot-flying's fitness for handling the 777, noting that in the most recent training flight before the accident, the instructor noted that he was not well organized and deviated “from multiple standard operating procedures.” During interviews after the accident, the Korean pilot-flying said, in English, that the approach into San Francisco was “very stressful” and that he was “very concerned” about his ability to perform a visual approach there.
Asiana doubts at least part of that assessment, noting that there was not a professional Korean translator in the room, the pilot sustained a broken rib that he had not yet been treated for, and his use of the word “stressful” in English was not as intended. Asiana had asked the NTSB to review the recordings of the interviews, but the NTSB says it did not retain a copy. “That's not typical,” says Haueter. “Normally we kept absolutely everything until the [final] report was adopted.”
Pilots on the morning of the crash were flying the “Quiet Bridge” visual approach that Asiana says kept the aircraft high and fast—compared to a normal instrument approach—until fairly close to the runway. Controllers instructed Flight 214 to maintain 180 kt. until 5 nm from the airport, more than 40-kt. above its planned final approach speed of 137 kt.
In January, two crews of professional pilots gathered by the NTSB for a “simulator observational study” demonstrated that the Asiana pilots were not unique in getting behind the aircraft on the approach. The study used crews of pilots from Boeing and from the FAA. All “flew” a 777 simulator at Boeing in Seattle. Each crew performed 10 test flights, five of which simulated a “standard” approach profile; the balance followed the accident profile, including the altitude and speed restrictions that air traffic controllers issued to the accident crew. Asiana says the results indicate that both crews “had difficulty” achieving a stabilized approach by 500 ft. under the conditions matching the accident profile. “In fact, the aircraft was considered unstable due to excessive sink rates on four of the 10 test flights conducted under conditions matching the accident profile,” according to Asiana.

The NTSB also evaluated go-around scenarios with the crews, determining that a “normal” go-around would have been possible 12 sec. before ground impact on the accident flight. Asiana notes that the 777's “quadruple chime” low-airspeed caution sounded 11 sec. before impact on Flight 214, and the crew took an additional 3 sec. before advancing the throttles for a go-around. Boeing, however, says that the low-airspeed alert (the quadruple chime), which sounded 11 sec. before the crash, “provided a timely caution of decreasing airspeed.” Asiana is asking the FAA for a dedicated low-speed aural alert that will provide pilots with adequate time to perform a go-around. Boeing's low-speed warning was originally developed for issues at altitude, and the chime is also used “with more than 70 other potential issues,” states the airline.
Asiana also uncovered some concerns about FLCH that were raised by the FAA in 2011. In a “response item” from 787 certification testing that Asiana obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the FAA had “strongly encouraged” Boeing to make changes to the 787 flight-management computer system to provide autothrottle “wake-up” capability to maintain a minimum flying speed in all autothrottle modes. Those modes are shared by the Boeing 777, 747 and 767.
The response item shows that an FAA pilot was performing certification stalls with artificial ice contours on the 787 in September 2010 when the concern first arose. “When in a descent such as FLCH with autothrottle in (hold) mode, and the descent has to be manually interrupted for something such as a traffic alert, the autothrottle will stay in (hold) mode and will not wake up [as] it does when you capture the original altitude,” the response item reads. “The speed will decrease well past maneuvering speed.” The FAA ultimately closed the item, but with the request for a software change to the flight-management computer at some future time.

The FAA discussed the origin of the response item during a December 2013 public hearing on the Asiana crash, but did not mention its request to Boeing to change the FLCH mode.
“Given [that it was not a safety or regulatory compliance issue], at that point, [the FAA pilot] believed it was an area where there still could be improvement and he worked with Boeing to include additional information in the flight manual to explain that the autothrottle on the 787 would not wake up from the autothrottle hold,” said Stephen Boyd, manager of the FAA's airplane and flight crew interface branch, of the 2011 response item.
Boeing's former chief test pilot, John Cashman, called the issue a “misunderstanding” of when the autothrottle would wake up and when it would command speed. “In the end, when [the FAA pilot] understood that this design has 210 million flight hours, he felt it was not as critical of an issue,” said Cashman during the December 2013 hearing.
Similar concerns had been voiced by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) during its validation of the FAA certification for the 787. EASA noted that the lack of a wake-up function in FLCH represents an “inconsistency in the automation behavior” to the pilots. “Inconsistency in automation behavior has been in the past a strong contributor to aviation accidents,” the agency stated.
Boeing makes the case that an FLCH mode that tries to control speed in two ways—through the elevator, as designed, but also through the autothrottle, as requested—will represent an inconsistency in its design philosophy and could prove unstable. “To do this would violate [our] design philosophy—that the pilot is the final authority for the operation of the airplane,” states the manufacturer. “This philosophy has led Boeing to avoid designs in which the aircraft overrides the crew's selected automation modes. There are some scenarios, such as when the aircraft is operating in a symmetric thrust condition due to engine problems, in which such a change could be potentially dangerous.”