$135.8 Million Fighter Jet Accidentally Shoots Itself And Causes $2.5 Million In Damage
We’ve all had bad days at the office, but one fighter jet pilot had a really bad day.
Earlier this month a Marine Corps F-35B Joint Strike Fighter shot itself by mistake during a training mission at the Yuman Range Complex in Arizona, US.
How did it do this? No one has a clue.
Not only is that arguably a tiny bit embarrassing, but the faux paus has caused an eye watering $2.5 million worth of damage.
Adding salt to the wound, the F-35 is reportedly one of the most expensive weapons to have ever been built. The whole programme is thought to have cost around $1 trillion.
While the incident is likely to have injured the pilot’s ego, fortunately they went physically unharmed and managed to safely land the jet.
Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Andrew Wood confirmed to Military.com at the time, ‘The mishap did not result in any injury to personnel, and an investigation of the incident is currently taking place.’
The Navy has since branded the ordeal as a Class A accident – the most severe kind, which is when someone inside the jet dies, the whole jet is lost, or the damage is $2.5 million or more, VICE reports.
Despite these jets costing millions of dollars, this isn’t the first accident an F-35 jet has been involved in. Back in 2014, one of the jets randomly set fire when preparing for take off, while in 2016 another F-35 set on fire mid-flight.
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