Engine fires...a pattern? Sabotage comes to mind...or seriously incompetent maintenance crews.
The Vinson carrier group has been on a large scale excercise since 8 Aug 2021. Might be a factor.
Engine fires...a pattern? Sabotage comes to mind...or seriously incompetent maintenance crews.
—
Sounds like the F-35 missed the wire or almost got it and lost control before careening into people.
Sabotage by dykes fighting, incompetence, lack of training, bad officers - my vote.
“Engine fires...a pattern? Sabotage comes to mind...or seriously incompetent maintenance crews.”
Slow down.
All of us who work high pressure Jet Fuel or Kerosene burring equipment know the hoses and seals wear out and leak from the out side in places one cannot visually inspect. The vibration level on aircraft is why just about any fastener is safety wired or marked so it be seen when it rattle out. Jets are not Kenworths or Deere you cannot fire them up and just let them run for 2 hours in the parking log to confirm nothing leaks. They pressize systems and let them sit for 15 minutes to see what happens, but the vibrations of a cat shot and a trap need a cat shot and a trap. We have 1000 19 to 23 year olds keeping about 70 aircraft flying at an operational pace land based units do not match. In the work up part of a carrier cruise the aircraft and deck equipment have generally just been overhauled, and then they are put in the most dificult enviroment other than launch to space, for 200 to 400 days strait. We are at the point even the F35s are returning from the service depot after significant overhauls. The engines on modern jet fighters are replaced for maintiance issues at least once every 300 hours, treated as a LRU (line replaceable unit), same a 1980s car radio. A fighter squadron deploys to a ship for a 9-18 month cruise. Every aircraft has at least one engine or major system it did not start the crusie with, replaced by NCOs with one very green officer “supervising”.
Lets remember what the hell is going on when a Supercarrier is workign up for a cruise or on station someplace interesting. Take a modern small city airport, drive it through a huricane, send it to pre war status, move it 20,000 miles on the ocean and manage it with just about 96% of people on board under the age of 25. Add nuclear weapons in the lockers, add explosives, add jet fuel, add a nuclear reactor supplied by the lowest bidder.
That one supercarrier does not burn to the waterline every decade is because of dedicated souls doing the best they can with the equipment and training supplied. There may be navy officers whos futures get remarkable changed over a rash of incidents, but that is typically a stememic human systems problem and not the poor kids inspecting aircraft before being rolled onto the lift.
Thirty Woke Training hours per year is not the problem for the kids, complexity of flying machines is a real problem. Lets not discount their task.