[b_davis_]

the F35 has standby instruments that work on DC batteries. it also has a radio that is also powered by a battery supply. probably an hour of operation without aircraft power.

no way it passed airworthiness without backup flight instruments and comm. every military aircraft for the past 50 years has this.

(oh, and the standby instrument package probably cost a couple of hundred thousand. certified for flight, of course)

[K0balt]

Well, that is good, at least. It sounds like those are Located between your legs? Could you actually do a 0/0 (not that it would be advisable) but -could- you even make a call safety at decision height with those? Even if you wouldn’t, would you feel like you -could-?

I’d bet if there was an iPad with foreflight synthetic vision running in plain sight looking forward, that aircraft would still be flying. Bailing out is a matter of pilot confidence in the aircraft being flyable.

Still, if he did have an operational horizon, HSI, turn and bank, altimeter, VSI, and turbine temp /RPM that he had presumably been trained to fly the aircraft with, I’m probably going to have to come down on the side of “he abandoned a presumably airworthy aircraft.” I mean, in that case, he had a (huge,catastrophically) failed system and he failed to use the backup for that system.

I still think the app would be a hit among F35 pilots, even if only for ironic reasons and superstition lol. Probably some national security concerns there though, if you handled any location data at all. I mean, can fighter pilots even carry smartphones? Dr. Evil wants to know.