playing golf with someone who has insight… apparently software driven ejection is what they’re concentrating on… I never knew this was an option.

Here's an eyewitness video of the F-35 crashing. It was some hikers. I don't understand why it took so long to locate the jet with this video, unless the hikers were well out of cellphone coverage.

https://youtu.be/16eay-9-L8E

Looks fake to me. Other than a youtube claim, where's the authentication?

It's fake, probably made in a video game (DCS).

Snow capped mountains in coastal South Carolina in Sep? Couple things wrong with that

Pilot ejects at 1400 local and the jet flies on until civil twilight? It went down north of Charleston, not Calgary.

Global freezing.

Climate change at its worst.

That wasn't the giveaway, though. Look closely at the cockpit. No fuzzy dice.

More insider perspective...

The pilot was a senior officer with plenty of experience, so not a student oopsie.

Flight of two, so only one would have been squawking to ATC. I don't know who was lead but since it was a training command I would guess the senior guy was -2 and doing some training/evaluating for -1 (who would have been squawking by default).

-1 would have focused on the ejected pilot, not the plane.

Also an ejection apparently triggers some onboard "cleanup", to reduce the enemy's opportunity to exploit the wreckage. Erasing critical items from computer memory... and deactivating IFF/transponder.

Radar reflectors apparently not installed.

The plane has GCAS, which prevents CFIT by autonomously leveling the wings and pulling up when ground contact is imminent. That might explain why it kept flying, if GCAS "saved" it every time it tried to crash.

The senior officer might well have been the student. If not given his age was likely the CO or XO of the squadron.

Wouldn't that be a real bad idea for a combat jet, that GCAS is still active after ejection? I'd imagine you'd want it hitting the ground as hard as possible to destroy as much of the jet as possible. Yeah, it'd crash with GCAS on too, but it just seems like it would be lot more logical for it to disarm after an ejection...

Yea, I thought maybe it was western SC where elevations rise to 3500'. But when I saw the map of the crash area it wasn't in that area. DCS has some good graphics and you have to look closely at some content to see it's fake.

Software update inbound...