Pilot of $100M F-35 that vanished for 28 hours parachuted into South Carolina back yard and claims he ‘lost’ track of jet in poor weather after ejecting

The pilot of the $100 million F-35 who was missing for more than a day parachuted into a South Carolina backyard after a malfunction forced him to eject from the plane, causing the plane to crash in a wooded area about 60 miles away. revealed.

The pilot, who had left Joint Base Charleston on a training mission, “suffered a malfunction and was forced to eject” Sunday at an altitude of about 1,000 feet, just a mile north of the Charleston International Airport, according to a situation report provided to AP by the Marine Corps official.

“He doesn’t know where his plane crashed, he said he just lost it due to bad weather,” someone can be heard saying about the pilot during an audio call from medical services Charleston County emergency report shared Tuesday by a local meteorologist.

The plane was not found until the next day, when a state law enforcement helicopter located the plane and debris around 5 p.m. Monday in a field near Indiantown, South Carolina .

The pilot, who was not identified by the Marine Corps, was not seriously injured and has been released from the hospital.

His plane was flying in tandem with another plane, which returned to base after the crash rather than following the unmanned plane. A second F-35 pilot, who was also participating in the training mission, landed without problems, the base Tech spokesperson said. Sgt. » said James Cason.

The Pentagon faces pressing questions about how it lost an $80 million plane that was eventually found crashed in a field just 80 miles from its base after a frantic 28 hours of searching.

There remained more questions than answers Tuesday about how an F-35B Joint Strike Fighter ended up leaving a debris field described as “vast” by the local sheriff’s department.

Authorities closed about a mile of road indefinitely as they continued to search for wrecks in rural Williamsburg County. Residents were asked to avoid the area while a recovery team worked to make it safe.

Federal, state and local authorities worked Sunday to locate the plane, and the military appealed to the public for help in finding the plane, which is built to evade detection.

In a military aviation incident involving two or more planes, it’s common for the remaining planes to stay put, said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps reserve colonel and senior adviser at the Center for Strategic Studies and international.

The scorched earth of the crashed fighter jet is visible in South Carolina on Monday

“If one goes down, the other will circle” to make sure the pilot is OK and relay information to the crash site, Cancian said.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was designed in three variants. There is the F-35A Air Force version and the Navy F-35C, equipped for takeoffs and landings from aircraft carriers. Then there’s the Marine Corps’ F-35B variant, which can hover, take off and land vertically like a helicopter. The plane involved in Sunday’s crash was an F-35B, the Marines said.

Each variant has an ejection seat. The Marine Corps variant has a specialized seat that can automatically eject to better protect pilots in the event of an incident while the aircraft is in hover mode. An F-35B crashed last December in Fort Worth while descending from a hover and the pilot ejected safely.

Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman for Joint Base Charleston, told NBC News that the plane was flying on autopilot mode when the pilot ejected from the plane.

Huggins told The Washington Post on Sunday that the warplane “has different coatings and different designs that make it harder to detect than a normal plane.” He added that the plane’s transponder was not working for an undetermined reason.

This forced the base to make a humiliating appeal for help in finding the plane – and even launch a hotline for advice, which was ruthlessly mocked online. “That’s why we put out a request for public assistance,” Huggins said.

Huggins would not answer further questions Monday, according to Joint Base Charleston, because the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing had taken over leadership of communications related to the accident. The 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing said an “investigation is ongoing” and would not share further details.

The jet is part of the U.S. Department of Defense’s most expensive weapons systems program, according to a May 2023 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The Department of Defense is evaluating its options for upgrading the engine, according to the report, and the “overloaded” cooling system requires the engine to operate “beyond its design parameters.”

On Sunday, military officials appealed online for any help from the public in locating the plane.

“The additional heat increases engine wear, reduces engine life, and adds $38 billion in maintenance costs,” the report states.

Former Marine Dan Grazier, who works for a defense watchdog and has warned about F-35 security problems for years, said a software glitch or cyberattack could have caused the device to malfunction. the missing plane.

He told DailyMail.com: “There are thousands of penetration points, weaknesses throughout the business, where a hacker could access the software.”

The Marine Corps announced Monday that it was suspending flight operations for two days after the fighter jet crashed.

The plane was finally found Monday afternoon in a county just 85 miles north of the base, with the wreckage of the plane located in a well-maintained field.

Aerial footage showed debris in a thicket next to the field, where trees had been toppled. The field contained a large area of ​​scorched and blackened earth.

It is unclear whether residents informed the military of the accident, which does not appear to have occurred in a remote area.

Three “Class A accidents” have occurred in the past six weeks, according to the announcement. Such incidents occur when damages reach $2.5 million or more, a Department of Defense aircraft is destroyed, or a person dies or is permanently disabled.

Commanders will spend the suspension period reinforcing safe flying policies, practices and procedures with their Marines, according to Monday’s release.

The announcement gave no details about the two previous incidents. But in August, three U.S. Marines were killed when a V-22B Osprey tilt-rotor plane crashed during a training exercise in Australia, and a Marine Corps pilot was killed when his fighter jet crashed near a San Diego base during a training flight.