Don Henley was right

chilligan +1 - I live a mile from a Navy Base, and have friends who are pilots. They certainly do know about troubleshooting...I've helped friends going through training memorize that shit. Don't know how to follow traffic patterns...what a dope...

PS - I said "dope" because they use my house as a reference point in their "Flight patterns."

Fox News got most of the good lookin' ones. Megyn Kelly FTW

I know, can't he fucking aim it at least to the nearest Scientology center.

Kwazy being serious? What happened to the whimsical, satirical Kwazy we all know and love to read?

Oh, and I forgot to say, "Get the widow on the set!"

i was thinking the same thing. good thing he ejected to save his own ass!

Wow, that is terrible. Thanks for the very uplifting post, Kwazy. :)

Maybe he tried to get to a less populated area. The witnesses said the plane was flying very low. I think it is too early to be second guessing the pilot.

Well, F-18s have 2 engines and each has a hydraulic pump for redundancy. I would think something more than generic hydraulic failure is involved. However military pilots are trained to fly in combat. Flying in the traffic pattern is secondary and amazingly military pilots get very little actual flying in...mostly simulators. I probobly fly more in 2 months than a military guy gets all year. With that in mind, and the fact that they are flying single pilot and have to try and fly and fix at the same time, they arent trained in troublshooting problems..they are trained to bail out. Its a memorized automatic checklist..such and such happens you eject..that simple. Who know what happened. It will take years probobly before a finding is made and the public probobly wont be privvy to it.

Yeah, probably could have been avoided - if the city/county/state wouldn't let developers build along the flight routes to airports/air-stations. Maybe they could allow commercial/industrial development (or storage areas/warehouses), but probably best in this case to just extend military housing/training along the route...

Yeah, probably could have been avoided - if the city/county/state wouldn't let developers build along the flight routes to airports/air-stations. Maybe they could allow commercial/industrial development (or storage areas/warehouses), but probably best in this case to just extend military housing/training along the route...

I am a military pilot myself and I have my own questions about whether or not this guy did all he could to avoid this tragedy, but lets please hold off on the second-guessing for now. There are many reasons he could or could not have controlled the jet enough to prevent this. I for one hope he did all he could, but regardless it will haunt him for the rest of his life and even if he did all he could will continually wonder whether he did enough. And RyanfromVegas... with all the military flying that goes on near you, you'd think you would know more about it than you do. You don't know shit. Your entire second paragraph is BS.

I would like to amend my earlier comment... I don't know shit about your job or who you are, so it was unfair. If you are an airline or professional pilot, you might indeed get more hours a month than a military pilot, but then I wouldn't count autopilot time among any of that - and certainly not as "experience".