ANALYSIS – Please help us find our lost stealth fighter. One of the world's most sophisticated and expensive fighter jets is missing somewhere in the Eastern United States.
The plane in question is a U.S. Marine Corps F-35B Lightning II – that's the vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) version flown off amphibious warfare ships.
The missing jet is one of 353 belonging to the Marines.
The plane and pilot were with the Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501 based in Beaufort, not far from South Carolina's Atlantic coast.
The Marine pilot flying the fifth-generation combat jet safely ejected from the F-35B over North Charleston, South Carolina on Sunday afternoon after a “mishap.” He parachuted safely into a residential area and was reportedly taken to a local hospital, where he was in stable condition.
Based on the missing plane's location and trajectory, the search for the $80 million plane was focused on Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, said Senior Master Sgt. Heather Stanton at Joint Base Charleston.
Both lakes are north of North Charleston. The manmade Lake Moultrie spans 60,000 acres and has a maximum depth of 75.47 feet. It is 14 miles wide at its widest.
The jet's transponder, which usually helps locate the aircraft, was not working “for some reason that we haven't yet determined,” said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston.
In a ‘duh' moment, Higgins added: “The aircraft is stealth, so it has different coatings and different designs that make it more difficult than a normal aircraft to detect.”
And since the jet continued flying in ‘zombie' mode or autopilot, the stealth plane could have traveled for hundreds of miles beyond the search zone. An F-35 has a range of up to 1,200 miles, but the jet's fuel load at the time it went missing hasn't been disclosed yet.
As Newsweek noted: “A fighter aircraft continuing on in the skies after the pilot has ejected is not unprecedented. In 1989, a Soviet MiG-23 crashed in Belgium after flying hundreds of miles from where the pilot had ejected over Poland.”
Joint Base Charleston (JBC) posted its appeal for help on X, formerly known as Twitter. It encouraged anyone with information that could help its recovery teams to contact its operations center.
JBC has invited anyone who might have seen a smoldering multimillion-dollar wreck north of Charleston to call 843-963-3600.
To make matters worse, the internet is having a field day.
Local congresswoman, Rep. Nancy Mace, tweeted: ‘How in the hell do you lose an F-35? How is there not a tracking device and we're asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?”
Some jokesters have posted photoshopped selfies with the F-35B saying “finders' keepers.” Others posted photos with “Find my lost F-35” posters pinned to trees.
The first joke reply I saw on X was a photo of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky smiling in a faux selfie in front of an F-35. The person who posted asked: “Have you guys checked Ukraine?”
One person posted: “President Trump probably has it next to his classified documents….”
But my thought is we should check Joe Biden's Delaware home's garage. It might be sitting next to his prized 1967 Corvette Stingray, where his classified documents used to be.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
READ NEXT: Report: Motion To Remove House Speaker Discovered In Capitol Bathroom
Ask one of the ILLEGALS, maybe they sold it to a drug cartel or a Chinese ILLEGAL group hooked it to a balloon and flew it to Beijing!!!
F35 issues:
Hacking
Sabotage
Planned crash
Hacking caused pilot to eject
This article should be updated. The debris of the jet was found.
Sorry, Renee–the morons are having way too much fun dreaming up alternate theories, so the real story doesn’t matter much to them.
This is really a silly nonsense story. The wreckage was discovered fairly quickly within the targeted area after locals reported a low-flying jet followed by a boom. The onboard transponder might have been turned off to test its stealth detection factor. What puzzle me is why the pilot ejected from a $170,000,000 fighter that was still flying.