Weird News, Marine Corp physically loses 135 million dollar jet after pilot bails out

Robert Zwilling

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After a technical problem, a pilot ejected over a residential area in South Carolina, where he was found, the jet he was flying, a F-35, however, has disappeared.

In a neighboring state, off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia, there is a lost nuclear bomb from 1958 that has never been found. It happened when 2 jets collided. No one was killed, and the bomb is buried in the sand underwater somewhere.
 
On a slightly related topic, the official report on the loss of the F35 on HMS Queen Elizabeth makes interesting reading.
In a nutshell, a cover was left in place on one of the engine intakes. This meant the pilot only had 50% power available. Reading on further, it looks like a combination of groundcrew manning levels (lacking in numbers meaning members having too many responsibilities) and lack of information passed on during shift changeover. Pilot was blameless.

 
I was the first on scene to two tactical jet crashes. One of them was after the pilot bailed out (no fuel), and the plane looked like it was just dropped flat on its belly. Mostly one piece, no crater. Like a child dropped a toy. Had it been in a forest it would have been hard to see if you weren't directly over it.

The other was a jet that the pilot got disoriented and flew into the ground at a fairly nose-down angle. The whole plane disappeared into the desert floor, and we only spotted it because the engine had popped out of the back as the plane pierced the ground. Like the 9/11 plane that hit the Pentagon, everything just folds back against the fuselage and makes a relatively small hole.

So it is not surprising at all that the crashed plane would be hard to find - especially if it flew normally for more than a few minutes. 10 minutes at 600 mph is 100 miles in an unknown direction.


Really strange the pilot abandoned the plane at altitude like that - makes me think they had a cockpit fire. Which would also explain the lack of transponder.
 

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