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The past year has been hard on the carrier aviation community.
Since November, three fighter jets — two of them highly advanced stealth aircraft — worth some $300 million have gone overboard due to accidents aboard aircraft carriers.
The string of mishaps shows how tricky it can be to operate an aircraft aboard an aircraft carrier.
Costly oversights
The incidents began in the Mediterranean Sea in mid-November. The Royal Navy flagship, the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, was returning to the UK after its maiden operational deployment, during which it sailed to the Pacific and back.
During what was supposed to be a routine training flight under sunny Mediterranean skies, an F-35B Lighting II stealth fighter jet crashed, going into the water after it left the carrier's deck.
The HMS Queen Elizabeth is a short takeoff, barrier arrested recovery carrier that has a ramp to help aircraft take off. A leaked video of the mishap shows the jet decelerating as it approaches the ramp — the worst possible time for that to happen.
Thankfully, the pilot managed to eject seconds before the F-35B hit the water.
An investigation found that the crew had forgotten to remove an engine blank — essentially a cover — which is meant to protect the engine from weather and debris when it isn't operating.
With an estimated cost of roughly $100 million for each F-35B, this turned…
