They (ATC) should have a pretty good idea where that jet plopped down from the M3/C track (always squawking in civil airspace) until it dropped below radar coverage, which is probably less than 1K AGL in that flat swampy area North of Charleston where he/she punched out. The NAS’s ability to solely skin-track any aircraft, let alone an F-35, is severely hampered without the “woobie” of IFF tracking.

 

I've forgotten a lot about IFF, M3 has an azimuth component but does it also do range via dopler? Or does that rely on the primary return?

But either way, I assume ATC has some data. And it probably leads to a lake.

Interestingly, there are a gazillion lakes in the Sierra Nevadas, and more than a couple WW-II aircraft have been found at the bottom of them due to all of the training done in CA during that era.

 

Of course, it only too 50 years to find them.

 

I doubt they've found all of them.

 

The state of New Mexico does not have a great deal of surface water but it does (or at least did) have a substantial underground aquifer - evenartesian wells (from which the town of Artesia NM derived its name. Decades ago many farmers built small surface reservoirs - big ponds really - that they could pump water into and keep filled so they could irrigate their crops with bigger pumps and sprinklers. As you might imagine, a lot of the water in these ponds drained right back into the aquifer. Sometime in the early eighties there was a big push to drain these ponds and line them with plastic to save on water loss back into the ground.

one such farmer, as his pond was drained, discovered a missile. It was an elderly Pershing 1.
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us.../pershing.html

it had been fired from White Sands missile range during testing in the early 60s and was not supposed to go off range, but ended up well north of its intended impact point. Not only that, in an area that was less than a half percent surface water it managed to hit a pond and conceal itself for 20 years. Weird stuff happens. Murphy rules.

 

They found the plane, not in a lake but many miles north of Charley South.

Interested to hear the story behind this one.

 

My buddy with insight says it was operating in LO mode, and the IFF (transponder) malfunctioned coincident with the ejection. So ATC presumably lost track.

 

The flight may have passed into an area in which the controller spilled some mayonaise on his screen. While the controller was routing other traffic around the spilled mayo, he couldn't see the missing F35.

Common problem. It could have been worse. It could have been peanut butter.

 

The F-35B has an auto-eject function which the other 2 models don't have. Something to do with being in hover mode. The jet flew 60 miles after the ejection before crashing in a field.
It really sounds like the auto-eject feature caused this since the jet flew on for that long before impacting what looked like rising terrain:

https://apnews.com/article/f35-crash...%20Subscribers

 

Anything's possible I guess, but you'd think there would be multiple safety interlocks on an auto-eject feature... fan door open, fan engaged, correct FCTL mode, etc, etc.

I'd think that 1000' AGL would be too high for STOVL mode on departure, but if it was on arrival the pilot may have been transitioning to STOVL.