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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

This and the fact that he didn't make the slightest attempt to work around it.

He had a flyable plane with plenty of fuel, a functioning backup radio and instruments he could have verified primaries against or just switched to, and even failing everything else, he could have verified against what the tower saw on radar for speed, heading, altitude, etc...and then asked the tower to get him to his wingman, and then followed his wingman in.

Instead he decided "HUD freaking out, that means I can't trust my instruments, that means I'm in immediate danger! PUNCH OUT!"

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There's a story of a fighter pilot, flying on instruments on a rainy night, who noticed his altimeter was reading level, artificial horizon level, but his speed was climbing even with the throttle steady. He immediately pulled the ejection handle, having correctly deduced that both altimeter and artificial horizon were were broken and he was plummeting towards the Atlantic. The plane impacted a few seconds later.

Different situation, obviously, but at least sometimes immediate ejection is the correct response to "HUD freakout at low altitude in bad weather."

(It was Brian Udell, the details are a little more complicated than I remembered but still. https://www.ejectionsite.com/insaddle/insaddle.htm)

While those cases do certainly exist, this was not the case here, he had time to troubleshoot and determine if his backup instruments were working or not.

The article states he was at 1,900 feet in heavy rain with nonfunctional instument panels. He was there, he's got the experience, and he ejected (which is dangerous too).

Maybe the commandant of the Marines would have liked a better headline, but another way of looking at it is the pilot lost his video server and really needed a functioning screen. I just threw away a video card in exactly the same scenario, and I felt I was troubleshooting far too long as it was. Maybe the commandant wanted the pilot to troubleshoot on the ground? But the computer was not any better after it hit the ground.

> with nonfunctional instrument panels

This is incorrect. He lost his HUD and the primary flight display, but not the standby instruments. Those are intended as a backup in case the other systems fail, and they did their job and kept operating. You can't use them to fire missiles or keep track of enemy anti–air radar systems, but you can use them to fly the plane, avoid terrain, and land safely. And he didn’t even check to see if they were still working before he ejected.

>> However, the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”

The interesting thing here would be to find out what "basically" means in that context.

Probably functional enough that a veteran pilot would know how to operate the plane

> HUD freaking out, that means I can't trust my instruments, that means I'm in immediate danger! PUNCH OUT!

Isn’t that indicative of what an absolute shitshow of a plane it is?

Eh, it was struck by lightning. It lost several non–critical systems as a result. Both the HUD and the primary flight display turned off and came back on a few seconds later. Both showed numerous error messages and warnings when they came back on. Both failed a second time before he could read or understand all of the warnings. It was certainly suboptimal, but not necessarily indicative of a poorly designed or engineered aircraft. The report had several recommendations that were redacted; probably at least one of those was recommending specific fixes to make the display systems more reliable in the event of a lightning strike, or to make them recover more gracefully.

How was the pilot impacted by the lightning? Maybe he had a few systems shaken up as well

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