Non Political Current Events Thread

[mikey]

Someone is going to print out "have you seen this plane?" pages and staple them to power lines and miscellaneous walls around town(s), right?

[Ad@m]

@shafnutz05

https://wjactv.com/news/local/house-exp ... nnsylvania#

Crews are currently on scene for a reported house explosion in West Donegal Township.

Mount Joy Fire Department confirms that the possible explosion took place on Bossler Rd. on Monday.

There are a large number of crews on scene handling the situation.

There is no other available information at this time but CBS 21 News does have a crew on scene and is working to gather more information.

[dodint]

Wooo, WTAE can stop milking the Plum explosion now.

Oh, nvm. *West Donegal. Not Donegal.

[tifosi77]

Someone is going to print out "have you seen this plane?" pages and staple them to power lines and miscellaneous walls around town(s), right?

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap your name, then tap Find My.
3. If you want your chain of command to know where you are, turn on Share My Location.
4. Tap Find My F-35B, then turn on Find My F-35B.
5. To see your F-35B even when it's flying itself into a swamp, turn on Find My network.
6. To have the location of your F-35B sent to your squadron HQ when the fuel is low, turn on Send Last Location.

[shafnutz05]

shafnutz05

https://wjactv.com/news/local/house-exp ... nnsylvania#

Crews are currently on scene for a reported house explosion in West Donegal Township.

Mount Joy Fire Department confirms that the possible explosion took place on Bossler Rd. on Monday.

There are a large number of crews on scene handling the situation.

There is no other available information at this time but CBS 21 News does have a crew on scene and is working to gather more information.

That's pretty much Elizabethtown, despite the Mount Joy address. Crazy

[Ad@m]

[DigitalGypsy66]

[dodint]

[MalkinIsMyHomeboy]

the comedy is compounded because of the fact that they have a “this is our happy place” knickknack

[eddy]

That and the shiplap, I thought I was at my parents house for a minute

[eddy]

Reminds me of this great interview

[tifosi77]

C'mon man.....

[Sam's Drunk Dog]

Direct link to the F-35 story and video

https://www.wbtw.com/news/state-regiona ... -crashing/

[DigitalGypsy66]

That's my local news lol

[tifosi77]

DG you might be able to shed some light on this then.

"According to officials, a pilot was found on South Kenwood Drive in North Charleston after safely ejecting from the passing plane." This appears to be just north of CHS (Joint Bast Charleston is co-located at the airport).

The crash site is apparently in a place called Indiantown.

I'm no Vasco da Gama, but it seems that's like......... 70+ miles away.

[tifosi77]

Also, for no one in particular...... VMFAT-501 is the Marine Corps FRS/RAG for the -35B. They're based at MCAS Beaufort, so I don't know if this section was doing practice approaches to CHS or what. The two airports local to me (BUR and VNY) get military traffic a few times a year, training sorties navigating different airspace classes under civilian control.

[DigitalGypsy66]

DG you might be able to shed some light on this then.

"According to officials, a pilot was found on South Kenwood Drive in North Charleston after safely ejecting from the passing plane." This appears to be just north of CHS (Joint Bast Charleston is co-located at the airport).

The crash site is apparently in a place called Indiantown.

I'm no Vasco da Gama, but it seems that's like......... 70+ miles away.

Yeah, you are correct. Indiantown (which I was not familiar with), is next door to Hemingway, SC, home to Rodney Scott's BBQ.

How did the plane make it all the way out there? Did it glide? Can a F-35 glide at all? So many questions that I bet we'll never get answers to.

I lived in the flightpath of CHS for several years, and a variety of military planes used it for training and short layovers. One of the feeder roads backed along the outside tarmac/hardstand area where these planes would be parked. It was common to see F-18s, A-10s, Ospreys, lots of E-2 Hawkeye/C-2A Greyhounds, over the years. The SC ANG has F-16s at CHS, as well as lots of C-17s and C-130s. I kind of miss the C-17s flying overhead. They would do all kinds of maneuvers, low level drills, tight paratrooper (I assume) formations, etc.

As for the guy they interviewed, that's pretty standard rural SC folk.

[Dickie Dunn]

The dude ejected himself to JBC? A+ for accuracy.

[tifosi77]

There are a lot of variables at play, altitude airspeed, aircraft configuration, lift and drag coefficients, wind speed and direction, etc. A general loose guideline would be you can go horizontally 7x - 10x your height. So all things considered, I think the only way a fighter jet would have any hope of straight up 'gliding' that distance would be if it was starting at like 30k - 40k feet.

This actually does seem like the jet flew itself under control for most of that distance until it puttered out of gas. Which is sort of odd...... if the jet is smart enough to yeet its own pilot, or at least know that the pilot has been yeeted then it should know that autopiloting itself in a "Crew, -1" condition is..... superfluous. Unless it knew to fly itself into the swamp, cos that would funny.

[MalkinIsMyHomeboy]

there was an kids gymnastics event in Ireland and all of the girls received participation medals…except a black girl: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/ ... black-girl


it’s incredible to me that this happened. Like kind of unfathomable. Even if the judge was a racist, she had to have known this was gonna come back to her, no? it’s also weird because there doesn’t seem to be any explanation as to what happened by the organization itself either

[dodint]

I got out of USMC aviation in 2012, and we had many platforms that could receive flight commands through tactical data links. I assume the F-35 has that capability. Obviously in this case it was not talking to anything, but I'd bet my house it *should* be able to accept flight instruction through TDLs. So having a default low speed cruise state after an ejection doesn't surprise me.

[tifosi77]

What's odd about the scenario is less that the aircraft continued flying than the fact that it was still flyable at all, if that makes sense. Usually the pilot gets out because there's an imminent terminal problem.

I'm not sure about the -35, but what I understand about older-gen aircraft is that when the pilot's seat leaves the aircraft the avionics will essentially reset, and all comms and datalinks are immediately terminated, in case the wrong people recover the wreckage. So upon ejection the aircraft is designed to basically go dumb/ballistic (I think maybe IFF keeps squawking until it can't, but I'm not sure).

It seems to have flown until the fuel ran out and the engine starved; the crash site had no real fire damage on the ground, and the relatively compact debris field indicates a slow-ish speed impact. And that it flew to a relatively unpopulated swamp/wetland area could be evidence of a controlled hide-and-seek type deal. But it took them the better part of a day to find the wreckage, which goes counter to that notion...... then again, by the time the crash site was publicly released, the entire airframe had been recovered and the site 'sanitized'.

The reports that are coming out now are that North Charleston was experiencing pretty sporty weather at the time of the mishap, so there's speculation that the jet may have suffered a lightning strike that scrambled things up. The A and B models of the -35 are known to be susceptible to lightning strikes that require them to have lightning rods nearby if they are unsheltered*. Apparently the jet might burst into flames - or even explode - in a lightning strike event if the fuel system isn't purged (and I think pressurized). Since it's a composite-skin aircraft, the airframe itself conducts the electricity. (The F-22 can accommodate passive dissipation systems under its skin because it's a much much larger airframe.) You would think anything mounted to the electrically-conductive metal airframe would be grounded and shielded, but.......................... *shrug*



* The Navy has apparently solved this issue on the -35C. That might be somehow related to the extra wing area and/or the internal structural beefing up required on the Navy variant, but I don't know.

[dodint]

What's odd about the scenario is less that the aircraft continued flying than the fact that it was still flyable at all, if that makes sense.

You think?

[Ad@m]

[mikey]

Who would have guessed that promoting shoplifting in city centers would become a slippery slope...? That's about as surprising as it gets, boys...