ionigeria.com Nigerian Newspaper
US military officials are asking the public for help to find a fighter jet after losing track of it somewhere over South Carolina when the pilot ejected.
According to officials at Joint Base Charleston, the F-35B Lightning II jet “suffered a mishap” over North Charleston, South Carolina, Sunday afternoon. They did not elaborate on the problem the pilot encountered but said the pilot ejected safely into a North Charleston neighborhood at about 2 p.m. and is in stable condition at a hospital.
The search for his missing aircraft is focused on two lakes north of North Charleston, according to The Associated Press.
Joint Base Charleston tweeted an appeal for help on X, saying, “Emergency response teams are still trying to locate the F-35,” it said.
An F-35 has a range of up to 1,200 miles but it’s unclear how much fuel was in the jet at the time that it went missing. With a full tank, it could travel for hundreds of miles on autopilot.
Jeremy Huggins, spokesperson for Joint Base Charleston said that for an unknown reason, the F-35’s transponder isn’t working. Huggins said: ‘That’s why we put out the public request for help.’
The jets are designed to be undetectable.
‘The aircraft is stealth, so it has different coatings and different designs that make it more difficult than a normal aircraft to detect,’ Huggins told the Washington Post.
