The pilot is alive, there is a report to explain what happened and has now been revealed. Accident dates back to the beginning of the year
A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes in a air video with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a jet problem before ejecting and the plane crashed earlier this year, according to an accident report released this week.
The accident of January 28 at Eielson’s Air Base in Fairbanks was filmed in a video showing the aircraft to fall straight and explode in a fireball. The pilot was safely ejected, suffering only minor injuries, but the 200 million jet fighter was destroyed.
An Air Force investigation attributed the accident to the ice on the nose hydraulic lines and the landing systems of the F-35, which prevented them from being triggered correctly.
According to the report, after offset the pilot tried to retract land landing systems, unsuccessfully. When lowering them again, they were blocked at an angle to the left. Attempts to fix the system caused the fighter to gather as if on the ground, causing the accident.
After checking the system verification lists in an attempt to solve the problem, the pilot entered a videomaker with engineers from the aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, while the plane was flying near the air base. Five engineers participated in VideoChamada, including a senior software engineer, a flight security engineer and three landing systems experts, according to the report.
The pilot then tried two “touch and go” landings, in which the plane landed briefly, to try to straighten the nose jam, according to the report.
But these attempts failed to reconcile the front wheel and resulted in the freezing of the main landing systems, preventing them from extending completely to try a real landing.
At this point, the F-35 sensors indicated that it was on the ground and the computer systems of the fighter moved to the “automated mode of operation on soil”, according to the report.
This made the fighter “uncontrollable,” as it was “operating as if it were on the ground during the flight”, forcing the pilot to ejected.
An inspection of the wreckage of the aircraft revealed that about one third of fluid in the nose and main landing system was water, which should not happen.
The investigation found a similar hydraulic freezing problem on another F-35 on the same base during a flight made nine days after the accident, but this aircraft managed to land without incidents.
The report notes that Lockheed Martin had published guidance on the F-35 sensor problem in extremely cold climates, in a maintenance newsletter released in April 2024, about nine months before the accident. The problem could make it “difficult for the pilot to maintain the aircraft control,” he could read in his bulletin.
The temperature at the time of the accident was -18 degrees Celsius, according to the report.
In the report it is concluded that if the participants in the VideoChamada had consulted the 2024 Maintenance Bulletin, “they would probably have recommended a complete planned landing or a controlled ejection instead of a second landing and takeoff”, which eventually led to the conditions that caused the accident.
CNN contacted Lockheed Martin to comment on the Air Force report.
The Air Force Accident Investigation Committee has concluded that “crew decisions, including making during flight video”, lack of “supervision of the dangerous materials program”, which supervises the storage and distribution of hydraulic fluid, and the non -compliance with aircraft hydraulic system maintenance procedures contributed to the accident.
