Marine Colonel’s Harrowing Ejection from F-35B Ends in Career Chaos

It was a gray, turbulent Sunday afternoon in late September 2023 when Marine Col. Charles “Tre” Del Pizzo found himself in a nightmare at 750 feet above North Charleston. A veteran pilot with a chiseled record of 2,800 flight hours, he gripped the controls of an F-35B Lightning II—the Pentagon’s $136 million crown jewel, a stealth fighter packed with cutting-edge tech. Then, in a heart-pounding 41 seconds, everything went haywire. Systems crashed, alerts screamed, and his high-tech helmet flickered out, leaving him blind in a storm. He yanked the ejection handle, rocketing into the rain-soaked sky, only to watch his career implode in the aftermath.

Del Pizzo, 48, was no rookie. A full bird colonel with a chest full of medals—Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, 19 Air Medals—he’d just finished a high-speed training run over the Atlantic, pushing the F-35B through 500-mph maneuvers at seven times gravity’s pull. He was prepping to command Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1 (VMX-1) in Yuma, Arizona, a plum gig to sharpen the Corps’ aviation edge. As he descended toward Charleston Air Force Base, thick clouds rolled in like a wall, defying forecasts. Rain streaked his canopy; turbulence jostled the jet. No sweat—he’d flown through worse.

Then, at 1:32 p.m., chaos erupted. His $400,000 custom helmet, a marvel that fused live video feeds with flight data, blinked out. Alerts flooded in: flight controls failing, GPS gone, comms dead. The jet’s engine seemed to spool down—or was it the lift fan? In the deafening whoop-whoop-whoop of warnings, he wrestled the stick, climbing to escape the ground. But the displays died again, then flashed back with a storm of 25+ error messages. At 750 feet, with no visibility and a sinking sensation, he made the call: “This jet’s going into the trees, and I’m going with it.” He grabbed the yellow ejection handle between his legs, braced his wrist, and pulled.

A shotgun-like blast shredded the canopy. Rockets fired, hurling him upward at 18 times gravity. His helmet ripped off in the 200-mph slipstream, metal shards slicing his neck. Three seconds later, his chute snapped open, and he floated down, rain pelting his face, the jet’s roar fading into chaos. He landed hard in a backyard the size of a living room, his parachute snagging in trees. Soaked and dazed, he limped to a house, knocked, and faced a stunned family. “I need to call 911,” he said, bleeding and shaken. They ushered him in, dialed emergency services, and handed him the phone. “I’m the pilot,” he told the dispatcher. “The jet crash-landed somewhere. I ejected.”

What happened next defied belief. The F-35B didn’t crash nearby—it flew on, pilotless, for 11 minutes and 21 seconds. Climbing to 9,300 feet, it traced a long, eerie arc at 350 mph, clipping treetops before slamming into a Williamsburg County swamp 60 miles away at 635 mph. Its stealth shell and a knocked-out transponder turned it into a ghost, baffling air traffic controllers. For hours, no one knew where it went, sparking wild speculation and memes: “Lost: One stealth jet. Last seen over South Carolina.” A Civil Air Patrol team finally pinpointed the wreckage near Boggy Swamp, ending the surreal hunt.

Del Pizzo, meanwhile, rode an ambulance to the Medical University of South Carolina, his back broken in two places from the ejection’s force. “Did I hurt anyone?” he kept asking, haunted by the thought of the jet plowing into a home. No crash news came—just silence. “Am I dead?” he half-joked to a doctor, grappling with the riddle of an ejected pilot and no immediate wreckage. His wife, Jessica, raced from their son’s flag football game to his bedside, shielding him from the brewing social media storm.

Three investigations followed. The Navy Aviation Mishap Board and Field Flight Performance Board cleared him, detailing a crippling electrical malfunction that fried navigation, displays, and radios. In zero-visibility conditions, they said, spatial disorientation—a dizzying inner-ear trick—took hold. The F-35B’s manual screamed “EJECT” below 6,000 feet if control faltered, and both probes agreed: most pilots would’ve punched out. They hailed his “sound judgment” and urged simulator upgrades. But the Command Investigation blindsided him, branding it “pilot error”—claiming he misjudged an out-of-control flight and bailed from a “flyable” jet. Del Pizzo fired back: without that tech meltdown, he’d still be in the cockpit.

By April 2024, his vertebrae healed, he climbed back into an F-35B, grinning ear-to-ear. The jet’s roar felt like home. He even cracked a mystery from that fateful day: the “spooling down” he’d heard wasn’t the engine dying—it was the lift fan winding down, a quirk he’d pass on to trainees. In June, he took command of VMX-1, moving his family cross-country. Generals raved in fitness reports: “Unlimited potential … must promote.” The Commandant himself hinted at bigger things ahead. Then, on an October 2024 video call, the rug vanished. After 103 days in command, he was relieved—effective immediately—over a “loss of trust and confidence” tied to that 2023 ejection.

The news gutted him. “I walked in the door, and he looked defeated,” Jessica recalled. No ceremony, no explanation beyond a press release echoing the Command Investigation’s lone dissent. After 31 years—759 combat hours, deployments from Iraq to Syria—he retired in 2025, unloading a U-Haul at a quiet rental near Washington, D.C. The F-35? He still loves it, comparing its growing pains to the Harrier’s rocky start. But the Marines’ about-face stings. “You can’t discard someone for a bad headline,” he said, unpacking mementos like his grandfather’s WWII canteen cup. “That’s how you lose trust.”

Aviators whisper outrage: “We fired a guy over a press release.” Others fear a chilling precedent—hesitate to eject, and you’re dead; do it, and your career’s toast. The F-35’s $2 trillion saga looms large, dogged by software glitches and a 15-36% readiness rate in 2023. Redacted reports hide the malfunction’s root, but Del Pizzo’s ordeal begs a raw question: when tech fails at Mach speed, who takes the fall? As kids play outside his new home, he ponders the what-ifs of 41 seconds that rewrote his life—and a system that turned its back.