Ooops! where has it gone.......!

[GeeRam]

The US Marines do seem to be getting a bit of stick over the lack of information as to why the pilot ejected at 1000ft......

• If he had a problem, did he declare an emergency before he ejected, likely therefore they must have had an indication why he was thus forced to eject from the bird, but nothing so far.
• Therefore seems this may have been an not required ejection (originally they said mishap, which has now been retracted) and given the aircraft happily flew on for quite some time might indicate the pilot vacating it wasn't intended. Maybe the automatic command ejection system the F-35B has malfunctioned and ejected the pilot by mistake. However, if they thought that, I'd be expecting them all to be grounded for checks if that was the case.
• The fact that it wasn't flying with transponder on is not unusual for any USMC, USN & USAF fast jets as they never seem to fly around the USA or UK/EU with transponder switcher on. You pretty much never see them on any of the flight trackers over the USA, or UK. You occasionally see the USAFE F-15E'showing up over UK, but you don't see their F-35A's and very, very rarely see any of the RAF F-35B's showing up on flight trackers.