Dragon029 wrote:Something to remember too is that when we had the first F-35B written off for a weapon bay in-flight fire they didn't ground any jets because the issue was known and theoretically manageable via increased monitoring of that wiring bracket in maintenance. If the F-35B didn't suffer something like a low altitude bird strike then it could have been a known, theoretically manageable problem.
Many civil aircraft send logs on limit-exceed, performance trend, anomalous incidents, via SATCOM while in flight.
Not regarding this particular incident per-sec, but do you know if it's the case an F-35 in flight does this to give basic information on aircraft condition to maintenance and logistics heads-up. Or to make schedules for checks or part orders so an off-aircraft datalog of a developing system issue (non bird-strike, etc.) exists on the ground before an incident/accident occurs? I vaguely remember something along those lines being discussed (separate to the false-positives diagnostic issues). In new aircraft the trend is to move such data off the aircraft (or at least to duplicate it off-aircraft in relevant locations) before it turns into an incident, and before it lands, mitigating the potential for another complete data loss event from a crash. I would have expected that sort of system to also occur for a new production fighter like F-35, given fighter crashes or damage events can often lead to a complete loss, especially for a single. You'd want that data on the ground first, if you could get it in bursts before the aircraft was unable to transmit. And you can get it, or some of it, so the mysteries of prior-gen aircraft losses shouldn't be as opaque now, or slow to grasp the under laying nature, or course of events. The indicators should already exist off board and some of the crash event data should have also been sent, before it hit the ground. There’s no reason why high bandwidth comms can’t keep sending detailed emergency incident data after an ejection has occurred. In fact, besides raising flags everywhere, I’d make it the system’s last act and highest priority, as soon as an ejection is initiated.
i.e. you 'eject' the aircraft condition data, incident data, and basic flight data, not just the pilot.
To my way of thinking, detailed data on a crash's sequence of events should exist on the ground, before the lost aircraft hits it.
01 Oct 2018, 17:16
