Questions Mount on How Fighter Jet Went Missing

The Pentagon is facing embarrassing questions about how it lost an $80 million F-35B Lightning II fighter jet that was located after crashing in a field 85 miles from its base after a frantic 28-hour search, the Daily Mail reported on Tuesday.

The stealth jet's transponder, which usually aids in finding the aircraft, was not working "for some reason that we haven't yet determined," said Jeremy Huggins, a spokesman at Joint Base Charleston in South Carolina, from which the plane took off.

In the search for the craft after an unexplained issue forced the pilot to eject, the base issued a humiliating public appeal for assistance in finding the jet, even launching a hotline for tips.

Huggins said that the aircraft's sophistication made it even more complicated to find, explaining that "the aircraft is stealth, so it has different coatings and different designs that make it more difficult than a normal aircraft to detect."

The F-35B was finally found on Monday 85 miles north of the base, with wreckage of the plane located in a well-tended field. It is not known if local residents told the military of the crash, which did not appear to have happened in a remote region, according to the Daily Mail.

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said she had been briefed on the search, but described the incident as embarrassing, asking how an $80 million jet disappeared.

A report from the U.S. government's General Accountability Office in 2019 warned that the aircraft's system "provided a back door for hackers."

Lockheed Martin, which made the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) on which the jet operates, did not release any details about the crash.

POGO, a watchdog, also released a report in 2019 stating that "despite years of patches and upgrades, the F-35's most combat-crucial computer systems continue to malfunction, including the ALIS maintenance and parts ordering network; and the data links that display, combine, and exchange target and threat information among fighters and intelligence sources."

The report went on to say that this means "that enemy hackers could potentially shut down the ALIS network, steal secret data from the network and onboard computers, and perhaps prevent the F-35 from flying or from accomplishing its missions."