Yet Another F35 Lost!

[Nigel H-J]

This time it is a race to beat China to it!!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60148482

Regards
Nigel.

[Airspeed]

Whoops
Unfortunately, too many letters for a Wordle candidate.

[Chris Trott]

A picture has circulated of the plane floating after impacting the water. I suspect there's much less concern over picking it up because the Navy was probably able to get bouys or similar onto it since it appears that it floated at least for a little bit.

What sucks is that this appears to be the second serious wire failure in the last 6 years. The only thing that saved the prior aircraft was that it was an E-2C Hawkeye and thus had power available immediately, and it didn't need nearly as much speed to be able to fly away (even then, it almost didn't make it). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4DtDu2DNKE

Thankfully, the sailors injured in the wire break will be okay.

[TSR2]

That’s incredible. I bet there was some clean underwear required afterwards.

[Paul K]

[Chris Trott]

Further update. There is video confirmed as authentic. Not sure what it shows (maybe a fantail strike?), but I'm not sure how much weight to put in the text beyond the "waggle of the tail feathers" being because it's going through the somewhat disturbed air behind the carrier (not unusual, watch other trap videos). However, the throttle up is interesting because I take that as the pilot initiating a go-around. The "smoke" and debris I believe is simply from jet exhaust hitting the deck, which would cause some damage if it was at or approaching Afterburner since it's not reinforced for that kind of abuse and heat and since it cuts out immediately after, we still don't know what happened on deck.

The article also notes that there has been a spate of incidents aboard the Carl Vinson and there's been a huge up-tick in incidents fleet-wide, so I still wonder if this is more going back to the larger organizational issues the Navy is dealing with right now than anything that might be with the airframe.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... inson.html

[Chris Trott]

Welp, looks like a fantail strike. No word on if it was engine and/or aircraft malfunction or pilot malfunction, but yeah, it hit the fantail HARD.

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/asia_p ... 4JhQjLJ5JA

[Paul K]

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGx9FffY0b4

[TSR2]

Looks to me like the approach was too hot? Its very difficult to tell from those images though. Seemed to be very heavy on landing.

[Chris Trott]

Actually the opposite. They ended up slow which caused the approach to end up short. Whether this was due to engine malfunction or pilot error is what hasn't been answered publically. I'm sure they know by now exactly what happened, but that's why it hit the fantail - ran out of energy as it arrived at the ship.