USAF F-16C fighting falcon Korean Crash footage

[Conspirator]

Apologies if this is posted in the wrong section.


Recently as i am sure everyone is aware.
An F-16C from the 8TH fighter wing Wolf Pack squadron tail code WP Crashed in a field eleven and a half miles from Osan Air Base in South Korea

https://twitter.com/x/status/1655235652873486336

View: https://twitter.com/aviationbrk/status/1655235652873486336

Video shows moment USAF F-16 crashes in South Korea - AeroTime

A United States Air Force F-16C Fighting Falcon fighter crashed in South Korea.

www.aerotime.aero

from the information i came across. (which isn't much) nothing is really known about the incident currently.
pilot ejected safely. and was rushed to a hospital. the footage was captured by a CCTV camera nearby the crash site and clearly shows the pilot descending with the parachute and then the aircraft exploding and being completely destroyed upon slamming into the ground.

Any information and/or professional analysis is welcome.

 

[Conspirator]

So its been a few days and still nothing on the investigation. But after some limited research i did discover a few things....
The F-16 has a very high crash history for various reasons.
Since the Air Force began flying the F-16 in the 1970s, there have been 383 Class-A mishaps, and a total of 88 pilot deaths. Pretty concerning.....
and after talking with a few (supposedly) Ex-military personnel at Osan one stated : "after what maintenance saw there i am not surprised"

so improper maintenance? cant rule it out.
thoughts?

 

[TomS]

So its been a few days and still nothing on the investigation. But after some limited research i did discover a few things....
The F-16 has a very high crash history for various reasons.
Since the Air Force began flying the F-16 in the 1970s, there have been 383 Class-A mishaps, and a total of 88 pilot deaths. Pretty concerning.....
and after talking with a few (supposedly) Ex-military personnel at Osan one stated : "after what maintenance saw there i am not surprised"

so improper maintenance? cant rule it out.
thoughts?

You're grabbing onto a really small amount of data without looking at context.

The F-16's mishap rate (mishaps per 100,000 flight hours) is pretty much in line with other high-performance combat aircraft. The raw numbers look worse because a) there are a LOT of F-16s and b) there was a really bad run in the 1980s.

 

[Conspirator]

So its been a few days and still nothing on the investigation. But after some limited research i did discover a few things....
The F-16 has a very high crash history for various reasons.
Since the Air Force began flying the F-16 in the 1970s, there have been 383 Class-A mishaps, and a total of 88 pilot deaths. Pretty concerning.....
and after talking with a few (supposedly) Ex-military personnel at Osan one stated : "after what maintenance saw there i am not surprised"

so improper maintenance? cant rule it out.
thoughts?

You're grabbing onto a really small amount of data without looking at context.

The F-16's mishap rate (mishaps per 100,000 flight hours) is pretty much in line with other high-performance combat aircraft. The raw numbers look worse because a) there are a LOT of F-16s and b) there was a really bad run in the 1980s.

understood. didn't know about the aircrafts history back to the 1980s. the F16 and other variants is one of the platforms i'm not so familiar with compared to others.

 

[mkellytx]

So its been a few days and still nothing on the investigation. But after some limited research i did discover a few things....
The F-16 has a very high crash history for various reasons.
Since the Air Force began flying the F-16 in the 1970s, there have been 383 Class-A mishaps, and a total of 88 pilot deaths. Pretty concerning.....
and after talking with a few (supposedly) Ex-military personnel at Osan one stated : "after what maintenance saw there i am not surprised"

so improper maintenance? cant rule it out.
thoughts?

SIB’s and AIB’s take time and are extremely thorough, unless the cause is extremely obvious these things take months. @TomS nailed it on the proper metric.

 

[Conspirator]

Been watching closely and nothing has come up yet.
As TomS said the investigation could take quite a while.
My estimate is likely either pilot error, a dead stick/faulty hydraulic control surfaces due to improper maintenance, or some kind of electronic interference.
Not truly ruling anything out at this point in time. could be a multitude of things.

 

[BlackBat242]

So its been a few days and still nothing on the investigation. But after some limited research i did discover a few things....
The F-16 has a very high crash history for various reasons.
Since the Air Force began flying the F-16 in the 1970s, there have been 383 Class-A mishaps, and a total of 88 pilot deaths. Pretty concerning.....
and after talking with a few (supposedly) Ex-military personnel at Osan one stated : "after what maintenance saw there i am not surprised"

so improper maintenance? cant rule it out.
thoughts?

You're grabbing onto a really small amount of data without looking at context.

The F-16's mishap rate (mishaps per 100,000 flight hours) is pretty much in line with other high-performance combat aircraft. The raw numbers look worse because a) there are a LOT of F-16s and b) there was a really bad run in the 1980s.

understood. didn't know about the aircrafts history back to the 1980s. the F16 and other variants is one of the platforms i'm not so familiar with compared to others.

When the F-16 first came out, it was the first high-performance aircraft with no control stick/yoke centered in the cockpit in front of the pilot - it had a video-controller-style joystick on the right armrest to operate the flight controls. Unfortunately, this did not actually move, it just measured how much pressure the pilot was applying (and it was pretty touchy).

This meant that there was NO tactile feedback for the pilot to be able to tell if he was telling the aircraft's flight-control computer to move the controls a little or a lot - until the aircraft reacted, sometimes more-violently (or less-effectively) than the pilot intended.
Naturally, this caused a number of "pilot-error' incidents and crashes, some at low altitude resulting in "flew into the ground" fatals (and the nickname of "Lawn-Dart" - stolen from the F-104).

After a few years the joystick was replaced with an improved model that allowed the stick to move a couple of inches from center, and had an increasing back-pressure function that required the pilot to push harder to get more joystick (and thus control-surface) movement - this allowed the pilot to more-easily judge his inputs to the flight-control computer.
There was an immediate and drastic reduction in over-control/undercontrol incidents and accidents.