A crash which left six US Navy sailors injured and left an F-35C Lighting II Joint Strike Fighter at the bottom of the South China Sea was caused by a mistake made by the pilot during landing, a Navy investigation found.
“This mishap was the result of pilot error,” claims to a recently-published Navy investigation, which found a first-time F-35 pilot “remained in manual mode when he should have been (and thought he was) in an automated command mode” before striking the side of the USS Carl Vinson on January 24, 2022.
“The mishap pilot (MP) attempted an expedited recovery breaking overhead the carrier, an approved and common maneuver, but the MP had never performed this maneuver before and it reduced the amount of time to configure the aircraft and conduct landing checks,” investigators claimed.
“As a result of the compressed timeline and the MP's lack of familiarity with the maneuver, the MP lost situational awareness and failed to complete his landing checklist,” the recently-released report concludes.
According to the US Naval Institute, “the investigation found that the F-35C pilot… was on his first deployment.”
The error led to not only the total loss of the jet, but also forced the Navy to embark on a costly salvage mission over its apparent concerns that the Chinese military could be interested in recovering the craft.
Lockheed Martin reportedly charges $94.4 million for the F-35C carrier variant. The much-maligned stealth fighter program has faced heavy criticism for its ongoing failures and enormous cost overruns.
Those condemnations have intensified in the past several years as multiple jets suffered critical failures in high-profile incidents.