August 28, 2025

On 28 January 2025, drama unfolded in the icy skies of Fairbanks, Alaska, when a high-tech F-35A Lightning II fighter jet crashed at Eielson Air Force Base. The pilot had struggled for 50 tense minutes on a live call with the jet’s maker, Lockheed Martin, trying to fix a serious landing gear problem. But fate forced him to eject. Social media caught stunning footage showing the $200 million jet spiralling wildly before exploding into a fiery ball. Amazingly, the pilot floated down under his parachute, escaping with just some cuts and a compression fracture in his spine. What went wrong? The Air Force investigation revealed a chilling culprit—water in the hydraulic fluid froze at minus 18 degrees Celsius. This froze the nose landing gear at a 17-degree left angle, jamming it badly. As Col Michael Lewis, head of the Accident Investigation Board, grimly put it: “The cascading events began when the water in the nose landing gear strut froze first.” This freezing tricked the plane’s sensors into thinking it had already landed, which switched systems into ground mode while still flying, making the jet impossible to control. After takeoff, another pilot noticed the landing gear door was still open, and the nose wheel stuck sideways. The pilot, Lockheed engineers, and the base supervisor tried two risky "touch and go" moves to free the wheel. Both failed. As ice spread, none of the landing gears could deploy properly, sealing the jet’s fate. The investigation said the decisions made during the 50-minute call “contributed to the accident.” This crash was no one-off. Lockheed had warned in April 2024 that extreme cold could cause false ground sensor readings, hurting pilot control. Ten days after the crash, another F-35 at the same base faced similar icy trouble but landed safely. The F-35 program itself has long been a mix of glory and pain—launched with fanfare but dogged by soaring costs, tech glitches, and crashes. The jet’s unit price fell from $135.8 million in 2021 to around $81 million now, but the program could cost over $2 trillion in its lifetime. Elon Musk slammed it in 2024, calling the design “broken at the requirements level” and “an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none.” He added, “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.” The Alaska incident joins a list of crashes: last year, a South Korean F-16C crashed due to engine failure, raising questions about aircraft maintenance worldwide. Australia plays a big role in the F-35’s global supply chain, with over 75 companies making parts. Victoria alone churns out 700 components. The Department of Defence says Australia has earned about $5 billion via this program, yet critics worry parts still feed jets used in conflict zones. This crash showed a tiny frozen drop can ground a giant $200 million beast. It exposed the limits of mid-air fixes, even with engineers on call. Most of all, it reignited debates about the F-35: Should we keep trusting such expensive jets when cold water and ice can cause chaos? The answer hangs in the Alaskan air, as frosty troubles continue nearly two decades after the jet’s first flight.

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Tags: F-35 crash, Eielson air force base, Hydraulic failure, Lockheed martin, Military aviation, Us air force,