Bit by bit, more details have been emerging about the bizarre disappearance of an F-35 Lightning II combat jet over the Carolinas earlier this week. At first, the Marines claimed to have no idea what sort of malfunction might have caused the pilot to eject from the plane, leaving it to fly on its own for a period of time before finally crashing near Indiantown, South Carolina. On Wednesday, we were informed that the pilot had ejected because of “bad weather,” despite the fact the other jet flying with him had proceeded back to base and landed without any reported issues. Now, a recording has been released of a 911 call placed by the owner of the property where the pilot landed with his parachute. He can be heard requesting an ambulance for the pilot, who later got on the call himself and similarly asked for medical assistance to be dispatched. His injuries were later described as “minor.” (Associated Press)

A military pilot whose advanced fighter jet went temporarily missing over the weekend is heard repeatedly requesting an ambulance in a perplexing 911 call from the South Carolina home where he had parachuted to safety, according to an audio recording released Thursday to The Associated Press.

The four-minute recording captures the bizarre circumstances for the three unidentified people involved: a North Charleston resident calmly explaining that a pilot just parachuted into his backyard, the pilot who doesn’t know what became of his F-35 jet, and a puzzled dispatcher trying to make sense of it all.

“We got a pilot in the house, and I guess he landed in my backyard, and we’re trying to see if we could get an ambulance to the house, please,” the resident said.

We still don’t know the name of the pilot, which I suppose is understandable. There’s no harm in respecting his privacy since we’re not talking about a criminal or a public official and he doesn’t pose any danger to the public. (Unless he gets hold of another plane, anyway.) If you click through the link above, you can listen to parts of the 911 call. Both the homeowner and the pilot sound relatively calm and collected. But the pilot also sounds a bit confused when he says, “I’m not sure where the airplane is. It would have crash-landed. I ejected.”

Another bit of apparent confusion shows up in the question of the plane’s altitude when the pilot punched out. He said he was at 2,000 feet, but the Marines are saying he was at 1,000 feet. How they know that is something of a mystery since they claimed to have no idea where the plane was, but perhaps they were able to retrieve some radar data from the nearby Charleston International Airport after the fact. 1,000 feet is a very low altitude for a parachute jump, but it’s doable since the chutes tend to bang open pretty quickly. When I was skydiving some years ago we almost never jumped from less than 5,000 feet and we frequently went to ten or twelve thousand.

Other questions that we were initially posing when the plane was “lost” remain unanswered. The pilot is described as being very experienced with thousands of hours of flight time. That makes sense since you wouldn’t just hand one of our newest, most advanced stealth planes to someone who had just walked out of flight school. So why would such an experienced pilot eject from a plane that was still apparently fully functional? (It reportedly flew for another sixty miles before coming down.) If the F-35 can’t handle a bit of a late summer rainstorm, it probably shouldn’t be going into combat. And, again, the other pilot returned to base with no issues.

We’ve also not been told why the pilot took the steps of setting the jet on autopilot and turning off its transponder before ejecting. If he believed the plane was malfunctioning and “would have crash-landed,” the autopilot seems pointless. And turning off the transponder on a stealth plane immediately turns it into a flight safety hazard for others. None of this makes any sense.

If nothing else, all of the conspiracy theories that some of us were imagining when the plane disappeared seem to have evaporated. If this was some sort of plot to sell the plane to the Russians or the Chinese, it went completely awry. It also doesn’t seem to have been any sort of inside-job domestic terror attack, or if it was, it failed miserably. Perhaps this will wind up being a case of a pilot who simply became confused in the middle of a training flight and made a bad decision. If so, maybe he should consider a different assignment that keeps him a bit closer to the ground.