The four-minute recording captures the bizarre circumstances for the three unidentified people involved: a North Charleston resident calmly explaining that a pilot just parachuted into his backyard, the pilot who doesn’t know what became of his F-35 jet and a puzzled dispatcher trying to make sense of it all.
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“Ma’am, a military jet crashed. I’m the pilot. We need to get rescue rolling,” the pilot said. “I’m not sure where the airplane is. It would have crash landed somewhere. I ejected.”
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In a separate eight-minute dispatch call released Thursday to the AP, an unidentified official tried explaining that they had “a pilot with his parachute” but no information about what happened to his plane or word of a crash. He said “the pilot lost sight of it on his way down due to the weather”.
The official also recalled hearing a “rather loud noise” about 25min prior that “sounded something like a tornado, possibly a plane”.
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The Marines said features that erase a jet’s secure communications in case of an ejection – a feature designed to protect both the pilot’s location and the plane’s classified systems – may also have complicated efforts to find it.
“Normally, aircraft are tracked via radar and transponder codes,” the Marines said. “Upon pilot ejection, the aircraft is designed to erase (or ‘zeroize’) all secure communication.”
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