2 weeks Ago
Editor's note: In previous chapters, Marine Col. Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo, a decorated combat aviator, ejects from his malfunctioning F-35 and lands in a North Charleston neighborhood. Three separate investigations would explore what happened and why, each with a different focus.
A Navy Aviation Mishap Board had teams of F-35 aviators, engineers and experts. Its goal was to identify mistakes and weaknesses, and draw up lessons to prevent future mishaps. Underlying the board’s work were legal protections that prevented superiors from punishing pilots and crews for anything they told investigators.
Results of this investigation aren’t released to the public. The second investigation was the Field Flight Performance Board. Its main aim: look at the pilot's actions.
Led by a senior F-35 pilot, it also included experienced military aviators and experts. The board's report typically isn't released to the public. The third was the Marines’ Command Investigation.
A senior officer handled this one. These probes usually have a limited scope. Their goal is primarily legal: to determine whether a pilot engaged in misconduct.
Results of this investigation can be released to the public. The first two investigations came to similar conclusions, according to Marine Col. Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo, the pilot; officials knowledgeable about the reports’ contents; and documents obtained by The Post and Courier through open records laws.
Both found Del Pizzo’s aircraft experienced a significant electrical malfunction, one that knocked out key systems — including displays and navigation aids he needed to land in severe weather. Knobs to radios weren’t working, making it difficult to contact air traffic controllers or his wingman for guidance. A small backup display was partially functional, but Del Pizzo had to look down to see it.
This and the zero-visibility conditions likely contributed to a phenomenon known as spatial disorientation, where your inner ear tricks you into feeling that you’re dizzy or falling. Both investigations noted that nothing in the military’s training and simulator work prepared pilots for a crescendo of systems failures in severe weather at a low altitude. In fact, the F-35B’s flight manual said, “the aircraft is considered to be in out of controlled flight (OCF) when it fails to respond properly to pilot inputs,” adding, “if out of control below 6,000 feet AGL (above ground level): EJECT.
” Both investigations concluded that most highly experienced pilots with similar levels of experience in an F-35 would have punched out of the plane. The Field Flight Performance Board lauded Del Pizzo’s record and potential to move on after the mishap. “Colonel Del Pizzo is a career-long high performing naval aviator and Marine officer.
There is no indication that Colonel Del Pizzo was overconfident in his abilities or reckless in mission execution ...
The board unanimously believes that Colonel Del Pizzo exercised sound judgment in his actions on 17 September 2023.” And both investigation boards made numerous recommendations, including new scenarios in simulators and changes in training. In Del Pizzo’s mind, that was how the system was supposed to work.
But the officer in charge of the third investigation came to a different conclusion. The officer agreed that Del Pizzo followed procedures under difficult conditions, and that Del Pizzo didn’t engage in any misconduct. However, he found the mishap “occurred as a result of pilot error, in that the MP (mishap pilot) incorrectly diagnosed an OCF flight emergency and ejected from a flyable aircraft.
” His report pegged the cost of the plane's loss at $136 million. Del Pizzo reviewed that report in early 2024, while still recovering from his broken back. He disagreed with the logic.
Without a massive system failure while flying blind in the clouds, he wouldn’t have ejected. This investigation also went beyond its normal scope of determining misconduct, which Del Pizzo and other experienced aviators interviewed for this story said was highly unusual. But Command Investigation reports typically didn’t carry the same weight as the other two safety investigations.
And the report’s conclusion that he was to blame didn’t seem to affect his career arc. His back healed, and he was cleared to fly fighter jets again. By April 2024, seven months after the mishap, he was back in Beaufort, climbing into an F-35B, feeling a sense of gratitude for another chance.
Those flights also would solve another mystery. Just before he ejected, he heard what he thought was the engine spooling down. But flying again in the F-35B he realized it wasn’t the engine, it was the powerful lift fan the plane uses in hover mode.
The sound of the fan slowing down contributed to the illusion that he’d lost power and was falling. An important lesson to pass on to future pilots, he thought. And he was still on track to take command of VMX-1 in Arizona.
"I kept asking headquarters, 'Am I good?' Almost every week." They kept giving him the green light. "The aviation leadership couldn't have been more supportive.
" In May 2024, he began moving his family to Yuma. That same month, he received the Legion of Merit for his work at the Pentagon. Smith, the Marine commandant, visited Yuma that summer and seemed pleased.
Del Pizzo said at one point, Smith asked him about his future career plans. Del Pizzo said that he was weighing his options. Smith told him that command of VMX-1 wasn’t his last chapter as a Marine.
“We put you here for a reason,” which Del Pizzo interpreted as a vote of confidence in his future in the Marines. Marine officers are regularly evaluated for their fitness to command, a report card of sorts that the commandant uses for promotions. Del Pizzo’s were stellar.
Signed by two generals, one report in mid-2024 said: “Absolutely must promote, GO (general) potential ...
Cheez is a pure professional with unlimited future potential ...
Has my highest recommendation for promotion.” Another report later in 2024 said Del Pizzo’s work in Yuma was “setting the course for Marine Aviation’s future ..
. highest recommendation for promotion ..
. Place where our Corps’ hardest problems must be solved ..
. Col. Del Pizzo’s potential in our Corps is unlimited.
” So he was stunned when he got the call last October: After 103 days of command in Yuma, the commandant had relieved him of duty. Effective immediately. U.
S. Marine Corps Col. Edmund B.
Hipp (left), a Beaufort native and outgoing commanding officer, shakes the hand of Col. Charles W. Del Pizzo, oncoming commanding officer, both with Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 1, during the VMX-1 change of command ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona, June 21, 2024.
The news came in a video call with one of the two generals who had written that Del Pizzo had unlimited promotion potential. “I thought it was just a chance to catch up,” Del Pizzo recalled. “I thought, ‘This is great.
I get some one-on-one time with the bosses and talk about how things are going.’ ” Instead, the conversation moved immediately to the mishap. The lieutenant general told him he’d done nothing wrong during his command in Yuma, but that a press release was about to be issued about Command Investigation’s findings.
Smith, the commandant, had reviewed the report again and decided that Del Pizzo shouldn’t have such a high-visibility command. Results from the other two investigations, the ones that concluded Del Pizzo hadn’t been at fault, wouldn’t be released. The Marines would explain the sudden relief of command by saying it was due to a “loss of trust and confidence,” which hit Del Pizzo like a dagger because it implied misconduct.
Stunned, Del Pizzo asked if he could have a small change of command ceremony — hand over the squadron’s flag as a way of thanking the people who had been so welcoming when he took over. Request denied. Soon, more than 300 Marines, sailors and civilians under his command in Yuma were told that he had been relieved for “misdiagnosis of an out-of-control flight situation.
” Until then, only a small circle of people knew he’d ejected from the F-35B in South Carolina. Del Pizzo called his wife, Jessica, to meet him at the their home off base. He didn’t explain.
She wondered why he didn't just send her a text. “I walked in the door and saw his face, and he looked completely defeated." Like her husband, she struggled to understand the timing and the treatment.
All three investigations had been done in early 2024, but the Marines still gave him a green light to take command? Why put him and his family through a cross-country move? What had changed between early 2024 and that fall? “We replayed it all the time, going back and forth,” she recalled. “And we couldn’t figure it out.” Del Pizzo asked to speak to the commandant directly.
“Obviously, I had a lot of questions.” Request denied. F-35B Lightning IIs are assigned to Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 211 at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
The F-35 program is the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program, a decades-long push to replace many of the military’s earlier generation fighters, from F-16s to Harriers. The military has at least 630 F-35s across the Air Force, Navy and Marines, with plans to build a fleet of 2,400 jets over the coming years. But in 2023, the year of Del Pizzo’s mishap, F-35Bs were fully available for missions only 15 to 36 percent of the time, the Government Accountability Office reported.
Critics of the F-35 cite the program’s costs and manufacturing delays. One big concern has been the jet's computers and software. Two months before Del Pizzo’s mishap, the Defense Department stopped accepting some newly built F-35s over frustration with Lockheed Martin’s pace of installing better displays and more powerful computers.
Those technology upgrades are only now set to be in place this summer. Test pilots reportedly have had to reboot their radar and electronic warfare systems in midair, another GAO report said. The exact cause of the electrical malfunction in Del Pizzo’s mishap is hidden in redacted documents, pages the military said it blacked out for national security purposes.
Unredacted portions ruled out some causes, though. Thunderstorms were in the area, but bolts at the time of the mishap were 20 miles away and couldn’t have fried the plane’s electronics. Investigators noted that the aircraft entered heavy rain five minutes before Del Pizzo ejected.
But a Marine spokesperson said its investigation found no evidence that rainwater caused the electrical malfunction. Del Pizzo isn’t one of the F-35’s critics. In fact, he’s a big cheerleader of the technology and the jet’s potential.
He sees its evolution through the lens of a Harrier pilot. Harriers had even more issues but became one of the military’s aviation stalwarts because of constant improvements in technology and procedures. He’d seen firsthand during his work at the Pentagon how tirelessly people in the F-35 program were working to do the same for that jet.
Challenge coins in a storage box of Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo’s new rental home near Washington, D.C., Sunday, March 9, 2025.
Souvenirs like this get handed out and collected as tokens of respect by military members. Learning lessons was key, which is one reason he was so concerned about the way he was relieved of command. Punishing him moved the spotlight away from the jet’s issues.
“We needed to take a hard look at that to prevent it from happening again,” he said. “In aviation, we have a culture. When there are errors, when things don't go as planned, we learn from them.
If you don’t do that, then you have a culture of fear. And if you have a culture of fear, then people are going to be paralyzed and not be able to make decisions. And that's how people end up getting hurt.
That's how people end up getting killed.” Some active duty and retired military aviators familiar with Del Pizzo's situation were appalled by his treatment. "We fired a guy because of a press release," said one.
Another added that the treatment of Del Pizzo sends a dangerous message: If you eject, your career is over. "The easiest thing to do is blame the pilot." The Post and Courier provided officials at Marine Headquarters with a long list of questions about the commandant's decision to relieve Del Pizzo, the timing of his order and whether he factored in whether his decision set a dangerous precedent for Marine aviators in the future.
The newspaper also offered Gen. Smith a chance to respond personally. Marine officials acknowledged receiving the questions but did not provide any answers.
Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo chats with friend Miriam Smyth, Sunday, March 9, 2025, at his family’s new rental home near Washington, D.C. Smyth is a retired Navy captain and is part of a large support system Del Pizzo has been helped by since he ejected from an F-35B jet over North Charleston in 2023.
There’s an aviation metaphor that business leaders and self-help gurus often deploy: During a flight, a plane is off-course 90 percent of the time. Reaching a destination means constant adjustments to turbulence, air traffic and sometimes human errors. Lives and careers have their own kinds of turbulence and course-changers.
As Del Pizzo recently unpacked his U-Haul at the family’s newly rented home near Washington, D.C., he talked about adjustments in his life, namely what it was like to be newly retired from an institution that had for so long been part of his identity.
He’s at peace with his decision to eject, though his mind also can start spinning what-ifs. What if the forecast had been more accurate? What if the cloud cover had been just a few hundred feet higher and he’d been able to see the ground? What if he had radio contact and could talk to his wingman? What if he decided not to retire? The commandant's order to relieve him probably killed any chances of promotion. What if he'd stuck it out? It can be difficult to close those loops.
The deeper pain comes from what happened more than a year after he pulled the ejection handle. “Maybe it was just a business decision,” Del Pizzo said of the commandant’s move to relieve him of command. “But there's a human element that you have to take care of.
You can't just discard someone because it's inconvenient or a bad headline, right? You need to make sure you take care of the people. That's how you maintain that culture of trust.” As he unpacked, schoolyard sounds could be heard in the distance.
Yellow-and-gray plastic moving crates were stacked in the living room. Two friends, both retired military, showed up to help him get settled. You don’t really retire from the Marines.
You’re still part of a group of people who helped forge who you are, and that never leaves you. He’d soon head back to Yuma to close the house down there, flying into the new unknowns of civilian life, questions lingering in the slipstream of 41 seconds of sensory chaos above North Charleston and 31 years as a Marine that ended because of someone else’s decision. This story began with the mystery surrounding the ejection and crash in 2023 — and the length of time the Marines took to answer basic questions about what happened and why.
Tony Bartelme’s previous reports in 2024 dove deep into the F-35’s history and pros and cons, while exploring the vacuum of information. Charles “Tre” Del Pizzo’s decision to tell his story answers many of those questions. He agreed to do so because he saw it as a chance to thank responders who searched for the plane, the family and medical providers who helped him, and his hope that lessons could be learned to help future Marines.
To corroborate his story and other aspects of military investigation procedures, The Post and Courier interviewed a half-dozen military aviators, most of whom requested anonymity. The newspaper also interviewed F-35 experts, both critics and supporters. The newspaper obtained more than 700 pages of heavily redacted documents about the incident from the Defense Department and local law enforcement agencies.
Del Pizzo provided documentation of his military record and fitness reports for our review. Bartelme and Robert Scheer traveled to Washington, D.C.
, for in-person interviews. Funding for the project was supported by the newspaper’s nonprofit Public Service and Investigative Fund. Col.
Charles "Tre" Del Pizzo, Saturday, March 8, 2025, shows a reporter some data on his computer at home near Washington D.C. The recently-retired USMC colonel, who ejected from an F-35B fighter jet over North Charleston in 2023, has grown frustrated with seemingly-conflicting messaging that found him not at-fault in the mishap.
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