Comment by loeg
> No pilot ever got in trouble for sacrificing their plane to make the smoothest possible landing to protect the squishy meatbags on board.
Arguably Charles Del Pizzo did, quite recently.
> No pilot ever got in trouble for sacrificing their plane to make the smoothest possible landing to protect the squishy meatbags on board.
Arguably Charles Del Pizzo did, quite recently.
It's not really obvious to me whether he control over the plane such that he could have made a difference to whether the plane interacted with humans on the ground, or not.
> Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane.
I don't think the article supports your conclusion definitively. Ultimately, we don't really know how controllable the aircraft was or how well instruments were working. (I'm sure the military has a somewhat better sense of this, but we don't have their unredacted internal reports.) In general it is very challenging to fly aircraft without instruments in cloudy conditions, and the risk is particularly high low to the ground.
Either way, your original claim that he got in trouble for totalling the plane seems wrong.
He protected one meatbag (himself) at the risk of an unknown number of other meatbags on the ground. They were right to fire him.
Context for others — https://www.postandcourier.com/news/special_reports/marine-f...