Monday’s crash in the South China Sea was the second of an F-35 this year.
On January 4, the pilot of a South Korean F-35 made an emergency “belly landing” at an air base on Tuesday after its landing gear malfunctioned due to electronic issues, according to the South Korean Air Force.
In previous years, F-35s have been involved in at least eight other incidents, according to records kept by the crowdsourced website F-16.net.
Last November, a British F-35B crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. The pilot ejected safely.
In May 2020, the pilot ejected safely when a US Air Force F-35 crashed on landing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The Air Force attributed the crash to a variety of factors involving the pilot and the plane’s systems.
In April 2019, a Japanese F-35 crashed into the Pacific Ocean off northern Japan, killing its pilot. The Japanese military blamed that crash on spatial disorientation, “a situation in which a pilot cannot sense correctly the position, attitude, altitude, or the motion of an airplane,” according to the journal Military Medicine.
When the latest crash occurred, Carl Vinson
hoka shoes for women and its escorts were operating in the South China Sea along with the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Group in dual-carrier operations that began on Sunday, according to Navy social media accounts.
The 1.3 million-square-mile South China Sea has been the site of frequent naval activity in the past several years as China has asserted its claims over almost all of the area by building up and militarizing islands and reefs.
The US military asserts its right to operate freely in what are international waters. Carrier deployments like the current one exercise those rights.
The two strike groups along with a Japanese helicopter destroyer staged a large exercise on Saturday in the Philippine Sea, the part of the Pacific Ocean between Taiwan and the US island territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.
A day after that exercise, China sent 39 warplanes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone, the largest such incursion of Chinese warplanes into that zone this year.
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