By Brad Lendon, CNN
A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with his fighter jet before he ejected and the plane plunged to the ground in Alaska earlier this year, an accident report released this week says.
The January 28 crash at Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks was recorded in a video that showed the aircraft dropping straight down and exploding in a fireball. The pilot ejected safely.
An Air Force investigation blamed the crash on ice in the hydraulic lines in the nose and main landing gears of the F-35, which prevented them from deploying properly.
Attempts to fix the landing gear caused the fighter jet to think it was on the ground, ultimately leading to the crash.
After going through system checklists in an attempt to remedy the problem, the pilot got on a conference call with engineers from the plane’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, as the plane flew near the air base. Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.
The pilot then tried two “touch and go” landings, where the plane briefly lands, to try to straighten out the jammed nose gear, the report said.
But those attempts failed to recenter the nose wheel and resulted in both the left and right main landing gears freezing up and not being able to extend fully to attempt an actual landing.
At that point, the F-35’s sensors indicated it was on the ground and the jet’s computer systems transitioned to “automated ground-operation mode,” the report said.
This caused the fighter jet to become “uncontrollable” because it was “operat(ing) as though it was on the ground when flying,” forcing the pilot to eject.
An inspection of the aircraft’s wreckage found that about one-third of the fluid in the hydraulic systems in both the nose and right main landing gears was water, when there should have been none.
The investigation found a similar hydraulic icing problem in another F-35 at the same base during a flight nine days after the crash, but that aircraft was able to land without incident.
The report notes Lockheed Martin had issued guidance on the problem the F-35’s sensors had in extreme cold weather in a maintenance newsletter in April 2024, about nine months before the crash. It said if the conference call participants had referenced the 2024 maintenance newsletter, “they likely would have advised a planned full stop landing or a controlled ejection instead of a second touch-and-go” that eventually led to the conditions that caused the crash, the report said.
Lockheed Martin referred questions about the findings to the Air Force.
https://lite.cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/alaska-f-35-crash-accident-report-hnk-ml
The F35 is the sum of everything bad with the MIC. Too expensive, too slow, too glitchy, cheaply made, loaded with Chinese Spyware.
Glad the pilot escaped. This reminds me of the movie Afterburn, starring Laura Dern. Made in the early 90s, it tells the story of an F-16 pilot that was killed by a flaw in the jets design and manufacture. The military tried to blame the dead pilot for the crash but his widow (Dern) fought them after finding buried evidence of serious problems with what was a very new jet at the time.
Hahahaha-“ if they had referred to a newsletter from last year”…
The stupidity of the whole company bookended by crap product and crap service. A pilot in flight should remember a line from a newsletter he likely didn’t read. And such an important point is in.. a newsletter?
Plus the reference is to extreme cold and this incident happens in August?
Just this weeks entry into the book of Americas collapse.
The report was released this week, but the incident was in January.
And the newsletter was April 2024…
Still maintain that’s a classic bureaucrat letter of regulation ploy – really? A single newsletter vs it being a whole chapter in the operators manual if cost of loss is.. what: $100 million per plane? Also a joke price and laden with pork
$200MM per plane.
Always glad to know that as bad as Boeing is, we could always aspire to be Lockheed-Martin.
I believe this is an increasing compounding issue due to increasing use of software for the most redundant things.
“Improvements” to products nowdays means taking anything that always worked, and putting in software that always needs an internet connection, otherwise it refuses to work, and fixing it can only be done by the company that sold it to you.
Electronics don’t hold up to well in high stress scenarios of heat and cold, so you don’t want to get too overspecced. The more complex the product, the more likely the problems.
It has been a constant critism that the Russians and Chinese design weapons for efficient production and ease of use in war, whereas the US designs weapons for the sole purpose of making money. The US then sells these to nations who can’t even use them without a lifetime subscription to US personnel and satellite connections. On top of that, the US companies rely on their enemies or foreign factories to make their chips because these same companies threw away domestic American labour for cheaper costs overseas in order to raise profits.
Capitalism is just as stupid as Communism when divorced from Catholic ethics, and capital becomes an end in itself at the expence of the human beings it ought to serve, who have been reduced to assets and as we see can be written off and moved around globally like investments.
Amen. Equality = Fungibility