Yesterday’s missing F35 story continued developing — and fortunately — seems to have ruled out the worst case ‘defection’ scenario. But we are far from having all the answers. ABC ran the story yesterday afternoon headlined, “New details in F-35 'mishap' as mystery remains about how jet was lost.”
The sub-headline — with a slightly doubtful tone — added dubiously, “The overall recovery process has begun, an official told ABC News.”
An anonymous Marine Corps official — ABC didn’t explain why his identity was withheld — said only that the recovery process was “ongoing.” ABC noted, “The official would not specify what point in the recovery and investigation process the Marine Corps is in.” Nor did the official say what caused the pilot to eject, or what brought down the F-35.
What he did say was the mysterious pilot enigmatically ejected at about 1,000 feet "and one mile north of the Charleston International Airport,” parachuting to safety in someone’s backyard. The faceless pilot who ditched the $100M stealth fighter was discharged from an undesignated hospital on Monday afternoon without any serious injuries.
Nancy Mace, the feisty Republican Representative for South Carolina, where the crash occurred, was vexed. “It's very frustrating to not have any answers," she told reporters annoyedly. Mace accused the Marines of not being transparent. "Not to be able to provide answers to the community, you know, when mistakes happen -- we should be able to take responsibility for it and communicate and be transparent with the public."
ABC quoted one of its regular news contributors, retired Colonel Steve Ganyard, who was shocked that the military could somehow “lose” the plane for 28 hours. "Even though it's a stealth aircraft, losing a stealth aircraft is hard to understand. ... It does seem ridiculous that an aircraft this expensive, this sophisticated, it could just vanish," he said.
Yes. It does seem ridiculous. Ridiculous and indescribably shameful.
You might also muse about how it’s odd to lose any kind of aircraft only one mile from the airport. Plus, the plane basically continued on the same line after the pilot ejected:
Did they even try flying the flight path in a helicopter? It was only 80 miles away right along the flight path. It should have taken them only half an hour to find it.
To be clear, we don’t have any idea what caused the crash or why it took the military 28 hours to find the crash site. Yesterday I speculated about nefarious Chinese hackers, and some skeptical commenters thought the theory premature. But I wasn’t the only one wondering about that theory. The UK Daily Mail ran this story:
It wouldn’t be the first time the military got hacked this year. Remember Jack Texiera? The young part-time Texas national guard member and video game aficionado who supposedly hacked all our intelligence agencies and downloaded embarrassing Ukraine intel that showed Biden had been lying for a year?
Like a lost F35 fighter jet, Texiera completely vanished off the news radar in May. But I digress.
According to the Mail’s article, a four-year-old GAO report warned the $80 million F35’s systems “provided a back door for hackers.” POGO, a military watchdog agency, also released a report in 2019 showing that nearly every software-enabled weapon system they tested between 2012 and 2017 can be hacked - including the F-35.
The agency wrote:
As if that weren’t enough, also in 2019 the Pentagon itself confirmed the F35B — the same plane that just crashed in Charleston — has already been hacked by the Chinese.
As I understand it, somebody with a Chinese accent called the Pentagon saying they needed the F35 login password to update the antivirus software.
Anyway. To be clear, I’m not claiming the Chinese hacked the downed F35. How would I know? But yesterday I badly underestimated the amount of software in that plane, relying on an older estimate. Current numbers put it around 8 million lines of code — just inside the airplane. The programs on the ground are even bigger.
It might be too early to call the F35 a “flying disaster of epic proportions,” but my money is on some kind of software problem, whether or not it was a Chinese hacker’s backdoor.
☕️ SPOOFED ☙ Wednesday, September 20, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Lost F35 fighter updates; two on-stage SADS and two SADS from the same show; breast milk study finds mRNA all over; Britain shutters gay conversion ban plans; Vivek spars with Andrea Mitchell; more.
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That was the first thing I thought about when I heard about the auto-eject feature. 
