The US military has found the remains of an F-35 fighter jet that went missing after the pilot ejected over South Carolina.
Wreckage from a $100 million plane that went missing Sunday afternoon was discovered in remote Williamsburg County, authorities said.
The pilot ejected from the cockpit and parachuted into the North Charleston neighborhood.
Before finding the plane, the Pentagon asked for help from the public to help search for the missing plane.
The remains found have been confirmed as the wreckage of the missing plane, a military spokesman told the BBC.
The fighter jet was in autopilot mode when the pilot ejected, a spokesman for the Charleston base said, adding that it may have been airborne for some time, complicating its discovery.
“The plausible sequence of events is that when the pilot ejected, the transponder electronics were fried and the military could no longer track his location,” JJ Gertler, a senior analyst at the Teal Group, a defense consultancy, told the BBC.
He said it was possible the aircraft continued to fly after the pilot ejected, but that it was “extremely unlikely” because of “the damage the aircraft would have sustained from the ejected seat” and “the change in aerodynamics when the cockpit is gone”.
The FB-35B Lightning aircraft belonged to a pilot training squadron, US media reported.
The pilot who ejected was taken to hospital and was in stable condition.
Another F-35 flying at the same time returned safely to base.
Before finding the wreckage, the US military asked for help from people to find the F-35 fighter jet.
The appeal of the US military caused a lot of jokes and criticism on social networks.
Nancy Mays, a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina, asked on social networking site X: “How the hell can you lose the F-35?”
“How come there’s no tracking device and we’re asking the public to find the jet and turn it in?”
The aircraft is a stealth jet, meaning its airframe, sensors and systems are designed to be undetectable by enemy radars.
If the plane was flying to pre-planned points, its crash location may have been determined by when it ran out of fuel.
The known speed and altitude at the moment of ejection, as well as how much fuel was left, could have made the search a simple mathematical exercise in determining his location.
Earlier Monday, the US Marine Corps announced a two-day pause in air operations across the military branch this week.
It said the missing jet was the third “Class A accident” in the past six weeks – a category of incident that causes more than $2.5 million in damage.
No previous incidents were listed.
Five years ago, the US military temporarily grounded the entire fleet of F-35 fighter jets after the fall of one in South Carolina.
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