Keeping cool over Salt Lake - An F-35A pilot recounts

[spazsinbad]

Never knew this USAF Safety Magazine existed (too much interested in NavAv with Approach Safety Magazine only]

Summer 2019 issue of Air Combat Command’s “The Combat Edge” safety magazine (4.7Mb pdf)

https://www.acc.af.mil/Portals/92/Docs/ ... 082713-560 [2 page pdf of story extract below]

This is like Walt Disney wodnerland! COOL: https://www.acc.af.mil/News/Article-Dis ... salt-lake/

Archive Place for all Combat Edge Safety magazines: https://www.acc.af.mil/Home/ACC-Safety/

Keeping Cool Over Salt Lake
22 Aug 2019 via defaerocom Air Combat Command; issued Aug 22, 2019 By Capt. Jonathan Lowell, 421st Fighter Squadron

"In a story published in the Summer 2019 issue of Air Combat Command’s “The Combat Edge” safety magazine, an F-35A pilot recounts how he experienced and coped with seven separate “fails” during a single sortie he was forced to abort. [This is a complicated story best read at source - I'll look for original article - so meanwhile...]

HILL AFB, Utah --- The day started like any other Thursday fly day. We briefed, put on our flight gear and stepped to the jets. Startup, taxi, takeoff and departure to the airspace all went as planned. Upon reaching the outer limits of Salt Lake City airspace, I felt the cabin pressurize, the air conditioning stop and a warning tone annunciate in my headset and on the panoramic cockpit displays.

While maintaining aircraft control and keeping a safe distance from my flight lead, I looked at my Integrated Caution and Warnings, or ICAWs, and saw that I had an “IPP FAIL” warning along with an advisory telling me that I was now using the auxiliary oxygen bottle instead of the Onboard Oxygen Generation System, better known as OBOGS.

In the F-35, loss of the Integrated Power Package, or IPP, means loss of OBOGS, cabin pressurization, cooling functions to many vehicle systems, backup generator power, and numerous other functions. From my emergency procedures training, I knew the first steps in the 11-step checklist were to descend below 17,000 mean sea level, manually turn on the backup oxygen system, bring the throttle to idle for five seconds, and actuate the flight control system/engine reset switch. These critical steps made sure I wasn’t exposed to any physiological effects from the cabin depressurizing or losing the OBOGS, and hopefully reset the IPP without further troubleshooting....

...Overall, IPP FAILs are not common in the F-35, but they do happen from time to time, and we train frequently to emergency procedures in simulators to handle them correctly.

As a young wingman in a single-seat fighter, I learned – and confirmed – five good lessons that I believe are applicable for any airframe and pilot:

1. Always maintain your composure and accomplish each phase of flight or emergency procedures one step at a time.

2. Take your time and maintain control of your aircraft before digging into a checklist.

3. Use the resources around you to back up your diagnosis and decisions. This will allow you to focus on the highest priority tasks. In this case, I had an awesome flight lead who took the radios and trusted my ability to handle what I was seeing. The supervisor of flying backed me up on checklist management and our game plan, and Salt Lake Approach Control got us where we needed to go in an expedited manner.

4. Checklist management is critical, especially in a single-seat, single-engine aircraft with hundreds of different checklists. I believe this was something I could have done better as we made our recovery back to Hill.

5. Once you are on final and prepared to land, focus on making a good approach and landing a bad aircraft, as to not make a bad situation worse. My flight lead did a great job reminding me of that and making sure my mind was in the right place as we approached final."

Source: http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articl ... ortie.html

[sferrin]

Keep waiting for the usual suspects to latch onto this without realizing it's a year old.

[optimist]

Wrong thread, but I'll leave it as it is relevant.

Would a redesign be needed, for a second pump controller to back it up?

https://navalsafetycommand.navy.mil/Por ... proach.pdf

Ultimately, I recovered safely aboard the ship with no further issues.
Post-flight maintenance revealed a failure of the polyalphaolefin (PAO) pump controller. The PAO is the liquid cooling agent used to cool a majority of CNI and mission systems. This failure caused the IPP to enter a preventive shutdown mode and prevented a restart when commanded. It also resulted in increased heating to the systems cooled by the liquid loop since the pump was no longer circulating PAO fluid, causing the ICPs to fail prematurely resulting in a loss of the CNI functions.