Safety Experts: Some F-35 Ejections Pose ‘Serious’ Death Risk [LONG COMPLEX ARTICLE - READ at SOURCE]
18 Sep 2017 John M. Donnelly"The F-35 fighter jets’ flawed ejection seats, which Air Force officials said in May had been fixed, still pose a “serious” risk that will probably injure or kill nearly two dozen pilots, according to an internal Air Force safety report that service officials withheld from the press....
...Twenty-two pilots will be injured or killed in the coming decades, unless the upgraded ejection seats undergo additional testing to show they work in “off-nominal” cases — in other words, when the plane is out of control, not just in optimal flight conditions, said the May 1 report on “F-35-A Residual Risk Acceptance,” obtained by CQ Roll Call.
Such cases would be rare — perhaps 2 percent of ejections, by one estimate. But the results could be “catastrophic” for the pilots, the report said. For “no less than $1 million” worth of tests taking “nine to 12 months,” the result could be “no additional losses” of pilots, the report said. But the program office “non-concurs” with the recommended testing, the report said....
...Another concern of Pentagon testing officials — one that has gotten less attention than the ejection seat — is the F-35’s polymer cockpit canopy, which lifts and shatters by design before the ejection seat is released. The worry is that the canopy’s “fragments may hit the pilot during the ejection sequence,” Cabiness said, especially if the plane is out of control. The canopy system, too, has not been sufficiently tested to see how it will perform when the plane is out of control, the testing office has argued....
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A question of oddsJoe DellaVedova, a spokesman for the Joint Program Office, told CQ Roll Call the F-35’s ejection seats are no riskier than others and the potential dangers might occur in only rare instances. And he maintained that the more thorough tests called for by the Air Force safety experts are not cost-effective.
The danger discussed in the Air Force documents is “the risk associated with lack of validated analyses, not that the F-35A ejection seat is unsafe,” he said. Likewise, Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman, said the service “has accepted risk of similar magnitude on previous ejection seats.”...
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The Air Force and Joint Program Office spokesmen also argued that ejecting from a fighter is inherently risky....
...The risks are considered serious, the report said, because
only component testing and computer modeling has been done to assess if the fixes work when the planes are out of control. Without new, more realistic tests of the reconfigured seats, the “predicted loss” is “22 pilots with minor/major/fatal injuries over the life of the fleet,” which is about 50 years — meaning an injury or death roughly every couple of years....
...New F-35s will have the somewhat improved seats, but all but four of the 235 jets that pilots are flying today have yet to be modified, according to program office figures."
Source: http://www.rollcall.com/news//safety-ex ... eath-risk/