A U.S. Marine Corps F-35 fifth generation fighter has crashed at Air Station Beaufort in North Charleston, South Carolina, with the aircraft having yet to be found. The pilot was hospitalised after ejecting. The cause of the incident remains uncertain, but it closely follows the emergence of reports concluding that another recent F-35 crash was caused by software issues with the fighter itself. An F-35A destroyed in an accident at Hill Air Force Base in Utah on October 19, 2022, when the aircraft’s flight controls registered incorrect flight data and subsequently stopped responding to attempts at manual control. The aircraft instead sharply banked to the left and and ignored the pilot’s efforts to abort the landing sequence, although this did not result in any injury to the pilot due to successful ejection.
The F-35 continues to suffer from close to 800 performance bugs with new ones continuing to be discovered. The fighter’s complexity having drawn significant criticisms from a wide range of sources. An F-35 pilot interviewed by American aviation magazine Hush Kit, for example, stated that many struggled with the fighter’s interfaces and cockpit displays. The pilot observed: “At present I am pressing the wrong part of the screen about 20 [percent] of the time in flight due to either mis-identification, or more commonly by my finger getting jostled around in turbulence or under G. One of the biggest drawbacks is that you can’t brace your hand against anything whilst typing—think how much easier it is to type on a smartphone with your thumbs versus trying to stab at a virtual keyboard on a large tablet with just your index finger.” His account was one of several similarly pointing to widespread dissatisfaction with what appeared to be excessively high tech features on the aircraft that actually hindered operational effectiveness, and have at times put pilots’ lives at risk.