The worst case scenario is the computerized plane ejected its pilot and defected by itself.
https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mishaps-and-bad-luck-tuesday-september
In spite of all the ubiquitous headlines, the military has not actually identified the Charleston debris field as the missing fighter. A conspiratorial-minded person might think they are just covering their sixes by hanging on to a “possible” crash site in case the plane turns up somewhere else. Whoops! Sorry! We had the wrong debris field. Here it is, over HERE!
🔥 All signs point to massive government mendacity and obfuscation, but what else is new? Rather, what’s the worst case scenario here? Let’s start with the second-worst case scenario, which is the pilot defected, perhaps stealthily flying the plane to the new Chinese military base in Cuba, which was easily within range.
But the Marines said the pilot ejected, not defected. True, it’s a pilot they haven’t named. An unnamed pilot they haven’t quoted. A mute, unnamed pilot who is reportedly still somewhere in an unidentified hospital being treated by unnamed doctors for unspecific “injuries.” Okay.
None of that makes sense, but let’s stick with what we know. Taking the official, albeit scant, explanation at face value, and assuming the pilot did eject — keeping in mind the initial reports that the plane had continued flying without its pilot on autopilot — we come to the possible worst-case scenario.
The worst case scenario is the computerized plane ejected its pilot and defected by itself. Maybe it flew itself to Cuba, after Chinese hackers assumed control of its highly-advanced instruments using the stealth fighter’s own networked “communications gateway.” Maybe this summer’s Chinese Spy Balloon mapped out a way to get the plane out of the U.S. undetected?
Could that possibly happen? I did a little research.
🔥 At a $1.7 trillion price tag, our enemies have a lot of incentive to capture one of the top fighters, either for reverse-engineering, or just for developing jammers, spoofers, and countermeasures.
The first thing my research produced is that the software running the F35 is hideously complicated. You could call the F35 the world’s first software-driven airplane. Estimates range from 600,000 lines of code to over 1,000,000 lines of code. And that’s just the software inside the plane. A code base like that takes a giant team of programmers to maintain, and the opportunities for bugs and glitches scale up along with the code base’s size.
Put differently, a massive code base equals a massive opportunity for bugs and glitches. With a hundred-milllion-dollar, nuclear-equipped fighter jet flying at mach speeds, the opportunities for disastrous bugs and glitches is equally massive. (C&C programmers: feel free to weigh in and offer your own opinions.)
But we needn’t speculate. It is common knowledge that problems have plagued the F35 program since day one. In fact, there have been several crashes just in the last twelve months.