There's the story of the guy, he was in GQ I think, who was answering questions like "What is't like to:" "Get ejected from a fighter jet?"
Scary shit, his flying machine was starting to do its real job which is of being a suicide machine, so he had to bail. The guy think he was an airman, became an inch shorter.
EDIT: I would say instead of "real job" I would say "original job." Early aviation was full of deaths. First the guys jumping off the Eiffel tower with wings, splat. Then the famous German glider Otto Lilienthal, splat. Then more experiments, then eventually the Wright Brothers, who said "how do we fly without going splat?" Their invention was how to control the machine, wing warping. Others already could power it, just not control it. And they both lived in fear of splat, that's why they refused to fly on the same flying machine.
Ok, so I did get it. And French people say "le". I just didn't understand why it's considered so funny. The YouTube comments especially praise this as the funniest comment ever written but it's pretty obvious?
I see "I flew backseat Mig-29. Will always remember pilot pointing at my ejection handle "please do not grab this, my government will be unhappy with both of us" [emoji]"
So wrong that the GoPro that the retiree was wearing was not even turned on, which is a shame, even if I doubt that the footage would have been released.
> Here at Martin-Baker, we run an exclusive club that unifies all pilots whose lives we’ve helped save: life membership of the Ejection Tie Club is confined solely to those who have emergency ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat, which has thereby saved their life.
Does that mean you need to be a pilot to be a member of the club? Or does being a co-pilot or passenger qualify? And if you're testing the ejection seat (wittingly or unwittingly as in the case of this article) in a healthy airplane, such that it isn't a life-saving technique, do you still qualify?
no, but you have bail out volontarily and in a dangerous situation, the question has already been put to the manufacturer: no tie for the unluky retired.
That is terrible PR. In any case, who knows what would have happened if he’d stayed on board, considering that nobody seemed to care about the limits the doctor set?
On the other hand, he probably does not want a reminder of his “adventure”.
>In any case, who knows what would have happened if he’d stayed on board, considering that nobody seemed to care about the limits the doctor set?
He would've been much safer, though maybe he would've passed out (which I fully recognize as an unpleasant experience.) Ejecting from a jet would be a very hazardous day for any job.
A co-pilot is still a pilot, and nobody willingly ejects from a healthy aircraft.
Ejecting can still go wrong, and subjects your body to huge compressive forces - it's not uncommon to fracture your spine.
Interesting point about non pilot crew though - although there must be a fairly limited number of fast jets that have mission crew with ejector seats. Perhaps a couple of US bombers?
> subjects your body to huge compressive forces - it's not uncommon to fracture your spine.
I've heard that military pilots are retired from flying after the second ejection (regardless of the reason for it) due to this spinal injury concern. It must be one hell of a kick in the ass.
Back in the 1950s and 60s my dad was a parachute training instructor for the RAF. As well as teach others how to safely jump out of planes, he also basically did QA for ejector seats.
His service ended when one such seat really wasn’t ready for humans. It totally fucked his back up — he didn’t become wheelchair bound, but was told to never lift anything heavier than a cup of tea for the rest of his life. Registered disabled from his mid-30s. Ejector seats were, and I assume still are, no joke.
Ejection seats also got a lot more powerful over time. The gold standard now are 0/0 seats, so called because they can be used at 0 altitude and 0 speed. Earlier seats had speed and/or altitude requirements.
Presumably this means that they kick you harder too, with all such subsequent effects.
Many early ejection seats used explosive charges instead of rocket motors. These were less powerful overall (didn't throw pilots as far from the plane) but I suspect they might have kicked a lot harder in the instant of ignition.
> Interesting point about non pilot crew though - although there must be a fairly limited number of fast jets that have mission crew with ejector seats.
I mean you're reading an article about one, aren't you? Also the Panavia Tornado. F-15E, etc.
It’s wild that the ejection sequence failed. Some two-seat aircraft have a “forward both, aft self” ejection mode for these types of events where you don’t trust the guy in the back to make good ejection decisions, and I originally assumed that was what happened here. Oops.
> the first ejection damaged the front seat, such that it didn't eject
This as well -- fairly damning evidence of failures in design and/or manufacturing. Fortunate that the extemporaneous round of belated testing happened over friendly territory!
The post-incident report found a design flaw in the box that transmits the ejection signal from the back seat to the front seat, allowing it to get damaged.
That and one loose screw.
What's wild is that a connector not being fully screwed in by mistake prevented a very expensive jet full of a lot of fuel from lawn-darting (and potentially killing a lot of people. Crashing fighters seem to have a knack for ending up in dense residential housing areas.)
The solo switch according to the youtube fighter pilot video is so that a solo pilot doesn't have to wait for the rear seat to fire if they activate an ejection.
I'm curious about that explanation--in the seats I'm familiar with, initiation (including all the different potential sequencing modes) is done entirely through an explosive train to prevent this exact failure mode (loose Cannon plugs cause plenty of other problems though).
We're talking about different things. In "forward both, aft self" mode a front-seat-initiated ejection still ejects both seats in the normal sequence, while in "solo" mode it would only eject itself. For obvious reasons, you would never fly with a passenger in "solo" mode.
There are other problems. My Dad had an engine fire in his RAF Vampire over East England, didn't have an ejector seat, and decided it would be better to belly-land the thing, which he did, succesfully, in a cabbage field.
He got out of the Vampire and trudged over to an old yokel who had been sitting watching all this.
Dad: Is there a phone around here?
Yokel: You'm will be paying for all them cabbages?
No idea. I'm not sure he should have been, but he very probably was - but my Dad was risking his life to protect the farmer, so Dad would not have paid for it. And as far as I know people were compensated for RAF crashes on their property - they certainly are now today, though RAF pilots do everything they can (up to their own deaths) to avoid militraliry accidents.
So if this wasn't during WW2, how exactly was he protecting the farmer other than in the same generic sense in which the farmer was feeding him?
Most Western militaries spent most of their time after WW2 doing other things than defending their nations' citizens so the question seems valid. I'm not initimately familiar with the UK's 20th century military hijinks but the only two significant conflicts I can think of were the Falklands (which seems to have pretty much exclusively been fought overseas) and the Troubles (which fighter planes wouldn't have helped with).
It's just a misunderstanding I think. It sounds like the OP's dad was in the RAF during the war, and "risking his life to protect the farmer" was a reference to that rather than the particular flight he was on when he had to make the emergency landing in the field.
So I can sort-of understand why they are being defensive. In their eyes there are commenters denying their father's effort in the war. But the commenters were actually either trying to understand if there's an extra story or were puzzled what kind of life-saving flights could be conducted in the British mainland in the years following the war.
The issue is that it sounded like there was some intrigue, a potentially interesting side story that wasn't well known outside some RAF-adjacent people. And when people asked about this you didn't clarify and it seemed you were getting annoyed with them. But really they just wanted to know more about your dad's story :)
> I'm not sure he should have been, but he very probably was - but my Dad was risking his life to protect the farmer
Why not? It's not your father who should compensate the farmer but the government. And if government property causes damages to a citizen's livelihood, then the government should compensate them. At least, in a civilized democracy.
Close. The term originates from payments the War Department (now DoD) made to families after someone died in combat. In some cases the payment was enough for the family to pay off the mortgage, so the dead person was said to have "bought the farm."
Well, you'd (theoretically) only do it when not doing it would be worse. So all those ways it could go wrong won't kill you, because you were already going to die. But if it all works, you might live.
What if the rotor destruct system fired when you weren't ejecting tho?
I can't find the specific incident easily by Googling, but I read a long time ago about an incident, possibly with F-16s, a training exercise where suddenly a sidewinder fired uncommanded, and took out another plane.
You would think that would surely be human error, but investigation showed that apparently something just shorted out.
Well, if it takes off the rotor, hopefully it also ejects you. If it doesn't, well, you should probably promptly initiate ejection. And the ejection should be easier, since there's now no pesky rotor in the way...
Attack helicopters are designed to be survivable even in very rough landings, so it's not actually obvious that a risky ejection mechanism is going to increase your chances to survival in all instances.
There are videos on Youtube with captured Russian pilots who ejected their aircrafts in the recent Ruso-Ukrainian war and they all had pretty big gashes on their necks and their overalls soaked in blood from all that bleeding like a stuck pig.
Apparently the canopy and ejection system acts like a guillotine on Russian aircrafts, but that's just what I've heard, I'm no expert on soviet era ejection seats, so if anyone has more info on this would love to learn more.
Well, you can have a pointy helmet or something intended to break through when all else fails. I don't remember the details, but I remember reading about something like that, on some aircraft.
This is my question. It's not unusual to be quite injured after an ejection - spinal injuries, wind blast injuries, parts from the canopy hitting you, hard landing.
It's not uncommon for 20-something military pilots to be retired from flying after an ejection. Or at least on medical leave for a year or more.
When I crossed into my forties a couple of friends were insistent that I do "a big thing" of clay pigeon shooting, go karting, overnighting in a rented a cottage, get all the guys together etc etc.
I point blank refused, I was going through a serious bout of panic/anxiety attacks at the time, and this was the last thing I needed. All I wanted was a few quiet drinks and a sit-in curry with some local pals. The amount of sulking that went on for weeks afterwards was quite something to behold.
I know that feeling; people projecting what they like onto you, assuming therefore you will like it too and then getting upset when you don't. It's horrible because it feels like it's your problem - but it's really not.
It’s weird too, because if they wanted to do all that why not just make that a separate plan/trip at a later date? There’s no reason to force it on someone when your free to just go do it as a group later
It's their problem because there is absolutely nothing wrong with just asking. People want to surprise other people with nice gifts while simultaneously having no idea whether the recipient will want it.
What a rude and unhelpful comment. If “stop feeling sorry for yourself, just go outside and do things” was actually good advice no one would have mental health problems.
This one flew right above me, what does that mean? It's it something like driving open convertible is referred to as fresco? Where I come from fresco was just a brand of cheap wine that students drank when we dabbling in sophistication an inch above vodka and beer...
Normally used to mean an activity in the fresh air, generally with pleasant overtones. So dining "Al fresco" might be a meal on a terrace, or a picnic in a park. Flying al fresco could be a jolly ride in a biplane or a hot air balloon, glass of bubbly in hand, not so much the scream of air through your shattered canopy as you guide your crippled jet to the ground.
That student plonk was aiming at debonair status; the favourite of my student days was a cooking wine with the grand title of Red Ridge Claret a little undermined by arriving in a 3L cardboard box, which stacked nicely on the mantelpiece as trophies of just how sophisticated we were.
Most Car and Driver pieces, even the relatively objective car reviews, tend to be better than average in this regard, with more editorialized pieces especially entertaining. It’s one of the main reasons I subscribe to the physical magazine despite its very large proportion of advertising, which is at least somewhat offset by a low subscription price.
Back in the early `90's there was a funny article, from Japan, being shared about a US fighter pilot who had ejaculated to safety after some mechanical issue with their plane.
I despised it. Made it incredibly difficult to read as the desperate attempts at humour mangled the English language so much I had to read half the sentences twice to understand what they meant.
> At which point the pilot beat feet away from the aircraft
Why were there so many feet near the aircraft that the pilot was having to beat them away? Whose feet were they? Were they still attached to the people whose feet they were? And if not, what on earth had happened?
baffled that one can make the observation: "attempts at humor mangled the english language", and in the same observation not understand one of the most widely used idioms in the English speaking sphere.
I'm curious - where are you from? I'm a thirty-something California native, I was able to piece together what the idiom meant after reading the sentence a few times, but I'd never come across it before in my life.
I also thought the article's tone was bizarre, for what it's worth.
I was born and have lived in England for decades and I've never heard it or read it before ever. I would love to know where the parent is from that they consider it to be "one of the most widely used idioms in the English speaking sphere". How many times per day do they use it? What kind of hell do they live in that they would need to use that phrase so often?!
Ouch! I'm glad the guy is okay, that could not have been "fun" given the description of the ejection.
In Sunnyvale they used to train Orion P3 crews at Moffett field. Of course Sunnyvale and the surrounding towns had a few military contractors doing RADAR development who did not have many military targets to paint, so when a P3 flew over it made for a good "real life" test.
On one such flight, the check pilot decided to "spice up" the newbie pilot's life as they returned to Moffett field by casually flicked on the RADAR threat detector. Sure enough, one of the contractor's search RADARs was 'pinging' them, but unexpectedly they were also testing a tracking RADAR which then subsequently got a good lock on the plane. That made the RADAR LOCK alarm go off in the cockpit and the trainee, as he was trained to do, immediately hit countermeasures without thinking. (That will save your life!)
The plane was on final approach to the field, and when it activated countermeasures it consisted of both chaff and IR flares (bits of magnesium, lit and cast to the side to distract heat seekers) These mostly landed on the Sunnyvale golf course which is in the approach path.
I used to play that course, and after this event there were a number of burn spots where the flares had landed and then burned out on the ground, and for probably two months there were bits of foil chaff that could be found in various nooks and crannies around the course!
Pretty much. There's a recent video going around of a Russian helicopter in Ukraine firing off all its flares in panic after its sister helicopter is taken out by MANPADS. Predictably, the Ukrainians wait until he runs out, and then he gets taken out anyway. Not that hard to search for it.
It seems like the natural next step would be "automatically deploy countermeasures while you still have [some threshold] remaining, then revert to manual below that," but I can also see how needing to train pilots in two or more different modes starts to pile up complexity costs and maybe leads to more mistakes compared to a simpler system.
In the picture above you will see a dial for modes. They range from human tell the machine exactly what to do (via the PRGM dial and other switches), to human consent to what the machine wants to do, to machine do what you want to do.
I'd be willing to bet the "hit the countermeasures immediately" reflex was because they were landing. Low altitude, low speed, no ability to maneuver. If somebody was shooting at you in that situation the missile would be on you in seconds and countermeasures are the only chance you have.
In a more normal combat situation there's a lot more human judgement needed in the use of countermeasures. For example if a fighter locks you up and fires a missile from 50 km away and you fire chaff immediately you might temporarily disrupt their lock, but it's likely that the chaff will disperse and they'll be able to re-lock you before the missile gets anywhere close. You can't just fire them off continuously because it's a limited consumable.
Love those old stories. I've climbed through the P-3 on static display outside the ramp, and I wish they still flew more of them around there. I used to be friends with a guy at the local grocery store who was a P-3 mechanic.
> That made the RADAR LOCK alarm go off in the cockpit and the trainee, as he was trained to do, immediately hit countermeasures without thinking. (That will save your life!)
And this is why there are armament switching which you turn on only when you enter approved airspace to employ weapons / countermeasures and turn off when you leave (and vocalize on the radio to do so for the rest of the jets in the formation). Then pushing the button which releases weapons or countermeasures does nothing.
My comment, as well as the parent post, refers to training. When not in training, the placement of armament switches, as well as many other risk avoidance measures, will vary based on the type of conflict and risk. There is a good article from a Ukrainian fighter pilot you can read to see the extreme opposite of the training environment (high risk flight with enemy overhead). The most surprising thing is that he doesn't run pre-flight checks. I bet he took off with those switches armed.
This comment is correct, it is not "normal" to enable the RADAR threat subsystem on training runs or when just flying along in your own airspace. The fault here was on the check pilot who thought it would be "fun" to turn that subsystem on to see the reaction.
No one is making a surprise attack on one airplane over Sunnyvale.
Just look at this from a risk management perspective. Chance of aircraft being surprise-attacked in extremely well-defended airspace during peacetime: essentially zero. Consequences of that aircraft being surprise-attacked: loss of one aircraft and crew.
Chance of inadvertent release of weapons and/or countermeasures when switched on: apparently not zero, given the trainee's response. (An automatic response that I would be very, very, very pleased to see as an instructor!) Consequences: potential loss of civilian life and/or property.
So you have zero * (1 airplane + 1 crew), versus non-zero * (? civilians + ? buildings). I know which side of that inequality I'm landing on.
No one was making surprise attacks against Honolulu in 1940, either. The point of the military is to be credibly prepared for even low likelihood events (which, due to game theory, is what makes them low likelihood in the first place).
You don't arm switches like that in training unless over a suitable area, like the water. Combat is different, where you may keep it armed on TO and landing for the reason discussed.
There also weren’t reconnaissance satellites in 1941 that would detect some fleet leaving Vladivostok (or some western Chinese port). There weren’t over the horizon radars, or airborne interceptors with radar that can see hundreds of miles. It’s a completely different scenario in almost every way.
Finally, no current potential enemy state has the kind of aircraft carrier fleet needed to perform that the of attack. The U.K. and China both have two active carriers, but the Chinese are still training up. The Japanese launched about 300 planes from six carriers.
Nowadays, any surprise attack on the United States would be a counterforce launch of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs with at most twenty minutes of warning to launch a response, and hours to launch a second strike, assuming command and control networks remained active.
What do you think does the risk-reward tradeooff look like between the risk of accidentally firing a live rocket in friendly territory and delayed response in an invasion that somehow managed to sneak by all early warning systems to the point where one unexpectant figher pilot has to intervene within milliseconds?
The only scenario after the invention of modern surveillance/detection mechanisms I can think of would have been 9/11 and in that case the problem wasn't reaction time but red tape, identification of compromised airplanes and willingness to shoot down civilian planes full of American citizens who might already be trying to recapture the plane.
To be fair, the planes at Pearl Harbor were arranged to prevent sabotage, which made them easier targets for an air attack. There are tradeoffs to every kind of preparedness.
On one side of the equation, where you've got zero (but it's not, it's just very close to zero) and the consequences may be your death of you don't act and are wrong.
It's like hearing gunshots outside the window of your house in your very safe hated community because someone thought it would be fun to prank you with a gun with blanks. Do you drive to the ground and maybe hurt yourself or knock some things over and damage them, or do you do nothing convinced that there's no way someone could be firing a gun close by?
I know what I'd do, and it's not the one that relies on a bunch of assumptions going against what the situation is presenting itself as when getting it wrong might mean my death.
It reminds me of a similar story I heard a while ago. As in your story, some military contractors were testing a new radar system at the factory. And conveniently, the factory was near an international airport, so they were using the civilian traffic as targets.
As these planes usually don't have threat detectors, they were completely unaware they were used as guinea pigs for this new radar.
That was until someone had the brilliant idea to test the radar on an El Al plane...
This must have scared the hell out of the Israeli pilots and it seems this created a small diplomatic incident.
I had to do a double take over 2 days to understand what you mean.
I've flown El Al...but I forgot the brand. In the initial read, I thought you were referring to a fighter plane make (kfir, mirage, sukoi, mig etc) so your story didnt make sense. Your story is more enticing with that context
This is a perfect example of how state militaries have more power than they are mature enough to handle.
This is the likeliest explanation for The Great Filter, in my opinion. Civilizations develop power well beyond their wisdom and then snuff themselves out.
I don’t understand the connection you’re making. This was a civilian who happened to work in the defense industry; we have no indication that he was otherwise familiar with the mechanical workings of the fighter jet he was put in. For all we know, he was the night janitor at a warehouse.
I feel like I want these people to know how to have fun rather than be robots. If someone is in charge of a nuclear weapon, I hope they know, truly, the value of life.
I also want them fucking around and not using the weapons in the Middle East.
No offense to janitors, but I don't think janitors get retirement gifts costing tens of thousands (if all would have went well, in this case I guess you have to add at least a zero to the price).
Ezra Dyer is such a great car writer. I loved the Car & Drivers of yore, especially pre-2010ish. Ezra’s pieces are the only ones left that remind me of why I was so obsessed with hoarding and re-reading these mags as a kid. Even so, I miss how clever & irreverent the old C&D was.
The sequence is fully automatic: as soon as you pull the handle, the canopy pyros blow a hole, the straps pull the occupant's limbs in, the seat launches, separates from person, finally chute deploys. Your next inputs after pulling the handle are steering and landing the chute if you are conscious.
By the way, the gentleman should be receiving a necktie from Martin Baker.
Interesting & funny article, but but... my brain keeps focusing on the fact that the pilot's ejection seat did not work => is that usually supposed to happen? In this case the Rafale wasn't even doing anything fancy... .
In the F/A-18 we had a selector that you could set to "both" or "rear only" exactly for this type of scenario. Qualified NFO in the backseat, you want both, and I know people who's lives were saved crashing off the carrier. But for a ride along, "rear only" is definitely the correct setting. And I'm pretty sure this has happened before, remember stories from years ago.
I'm so sorry for the retiree. I'm sure the colleagues meant well with this unusual present, and it probably was an admin effort to pull it off, but he was clearly uncomfortable to receive his gift.
What hasn't been covered in the comments, to my surprise, is the aspect of peer pressure that made him accept the present. This wasn't a gift voucher for a flight in a hot air balloon, so colleagues should have planned for a "plan b" in case he wasn't going to have the flight for fear for his safety. Apparently, social pressure was exercised to coerce him - bad, shame on them!
This is too fantastic. I am sure that it did happen, but the specifics here are exaggerated. For one, ejection seats are not "designed" to both eject. That is one of many options, one you do not set on passenger rides for specifically this scenario. And I am confused about the "negative .67g". Is that 0.67, whch is .33 below normal, or -0.67 which is basically like hanging upsidedown. Fighter pilots don't pull that much negative under normal circumstances, let alone with a civilian passenger. 0.67 would be scary for the uninitiated, but it isn't crazy. You can feel almost that in normal airline flying.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadhttps://www.caranddriver.com/news/a32131240/french-dassault-...
Text-only version: https://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_2ab742409be210c718777d3fb8...
Scary shit, his flying machine was starting to do its real job which is of being a suicide machine, so he had to bail. The guy think he was an airman, became an inch shorter.
EDIT: I would say instead of "real job" I would say "original job." Early aviation was full of deaths. First the guys jumping off the Eiffel tower with wings, splat. Then the famous German glider Otto Lilienthal, splat. Then more experiments, then eventually the Wright Brothers, who said "how do we fly without going splat?" Their invention was how to control the machine, wing warping. Others already could power it, just not control it. And they both lived in fear of splat, that's why they refused to fly on the same flying machine.
Intro ends at 1:25
PS. I am a millennial, and I absolutely love the zoomer humor. You guys are f* hilarious ^_^
Mobile app: "Pilot: you OK back there? Retiree: Le’YEET!!!!"
Desktop browser: "He got everything in one trip. Ride in a fighter jet, ejecting, and a sky dive."
Another testament to Youtube's amazing UX consistency. /s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAcpoMhuqqw
https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/
> Here at Martin-Baker, we run an exclusive club that unifies all pilots whose lives we’ve helped save: life membership of the Ejection Tie Club is confined solely to those who have emergency ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat, which has thereby saved their life.
Does that mean you need to be a pilot to be a member of the club? Or does being a co-pilot or passenger qualify? And if you're testing the ejection seat (wittingly or unwittingly as in the case of this article) in a healthy airplane, such that it isn't a life-saving technique, do you still qualify?
And before,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729307
On the other hand, he probably does not want a reminder of his “adventure”.
He would've been much safer, though maybe he would've passed out (which I fully recognize as an unpleasant experience.) Ejecting from a jet would be a very hazardous day for any job.
Ejecting can still go wrong, and subjects your body to huge compressive forces - it's not uncommon to fracture your spine.
Interesting point about non pilot crew though - although there must be a fairly limited number of fast jets that have mission crew with ejector seats. Perhaps a couple of US bombers?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-104_Starfighter#Eje...
Super convenient - climb a ladder, strap in and then tech guys winch you up with a hand crank (on first models).
Altitude less than 1500 ft and you're dead. G-load above a threshold and its rails jam, so you're not going anywhere. 1950s tech that flew into 1990s.
I've heard that military pilots are retired from flying after the second ejection (regardless of the reason for it) due to this spinal injury concern. It must be one hell of a kick in the ass.
His service ended when one such seat really wasn’t ready for humans. It totally fucked his back up — he didn’t become wheelchair bound, but was told to never lift anything heavier than a cup of tea for the rest of his life. Registered disabled from his mid-30s. Ejector seats were, and I assume still are, no joke.
Presumably this means that they kick you harder too, with all such subsequent effects.
You'd think so, but sadly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29729307
I mean you're reading an article about one, aren't you? Also the Panavia Tornado. F-15E, etc.
This as well -- fairly damning evidence of failures in design and/or manufacturing. Fortunate that the extemporaneous round of belated testing happened over friendly territory!
The solo switch according to the youtube fighter pilot video is so that a solo pilot doesn't have to wait for the rear seat to fire if they activate an ejection.
We're talking about different things. In "forward both, aft self" mode a front-seat-initiated ejection still ejects both seats in the normal sequence, while in "solo" mode it would only eject itself. For obvious reasons, you would never fly with a passenger in "solo" mode.
He got out of the Vampire and trudged over to an old yokel who had been sitting watching all this.
Dad: Is there a phone around here?
Yokel: You'm will be paying for all them cabbages?
Most Western militaries spent most of their time after WW2 doing other things than defending their nations' citizens so the question seems valid. I'm not initimately familiar with the UK's 20th century military hijinks but the only two significant conflicts I can think of were the Falklands (which seems to have pretty much exclusively been fought overseas) and the Troubles (which fighter planes wouldn't have helped with).
So I can sort-of understand why they are being defensive. In their eyes there are commenters denying their father's effort in the war. But the commenters were actually either trying to understand if there's an extra story or were puzzled what kind of life-saving flights could be conducted in the British mainland in the years following the war.
Has the RAF been anything other than a deterrent in Europe since then?
Why not? It's not your father who should compensate the farmer but the government. And if government property causes damages to a citizen's livelihood, then the government should compensate them. At least, in a civilized democracy.
Hence:
> but he very probably was
> I'm not sure he should have been
To
> I'm not sure, he should have been
Otherwise it reads like you think he shouldn't have been compensated.
The farmer is an equal citizen with equal rights, regardless - that is what the pilot was protecting.
"For improved pilot survivability the Ka-50 is fitted with a NPP Zvezda K-37-800 ejection seat, which is a rare feature for a helicopter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50
Yes, ok, it has explosives to blow away the rotors. But how many different ways could that go wrong...
I can't find the specific incident easily by Googling, but I read a long time ago about an incident, possibly with F-16s, a training exercise where suddenly a sidewinder fired uncommanded, and took out another plane.
You would think that would surely be human error, but investigation showed that apparently something just shorted out.
There are videos on Youtube with captured Russian pilots who ejected their aircrafts in the recent Ruso-Ukrainian war and they all had pretty big gashes on their necks and their overalls soaked in blood from all that bleeding like a stuck pig.
Apparently the canopy and ejection system acts like a guillotine on Russian aircrafts, but that's just what I've heard, I'm no expert on soviet era ejection seats, so if anyone has more info on this would love to learn more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vln5TaRt5LU
It's not uncommon for 20-something military pilots to be retired from flying after an ejection. Or at least on medical leave for a year or more.
I point blank refused, I was going through a serious bout of panic/anxiety attacks at the time, and this was the last thing I needed. All I wanted was a few quiet drinks and a sit-in curry with some local pals. The amount of sulking that went on for weeks afterwards was quite something to behold.
That student plonk was aiming at debonair status; the favourite of my student days was a cooking wine with the grand title of Red Ridge Claret a little undermined by arriving in a 3L cardboard box, which stacked nicely on the mantelpiece as trophies of just how sophisticated we were.
However the term "en plein air" means works executed in the outdoors.
Here's a bit about how he got his start writing about cars. https://www.motortrend.com/features/ezra-dyer/
> At which point the pilot beat feet away from the aircraft
Why were there so many feet near the aircraft that the pilot was having to beat them away? Whose feet were they? Were they still attached to the people whose feet they were? And if not, what on earth had happened?
I also thought the article's tone was bizarre, for what it's worth.
In Sunnyvale they used to train Orion P3 crews at Moffett field. Of course Sunnyvale and the surrounding towns had a few military contractors doing RADAR development who did not have many military targets to paint, so when a P3 flew over it made for a good "real life" test.
On one such flight, the check pilot decided to "spice up" the newbie pilot's life as they returned to Moffett field by casually flicked on the RADAR threat detector. Sure enough, one of the contractor's search RADARs was 'pinging' them, but unexpectedly they were also testing a tracking RADAR which then subsequently got a good lock on the plane. That made the RADAR LOCK alarm go off in the cockpit and the trainee, as he was trained to do, immediately hit countermeasures without thinking. (That will save your life!)
The plane was on final approach to the field, and when it activated countermeasures it consisted of both chaff and IR flares (bits of magnesium, lit and cast to the side to distract heat seekers) These mostly landed on the Sunnyvale golf course which is in the approach path.
I used to play that course, and after this event there were a number of burn spots where the flares had landed and then burned out on the ground, and for probably two months there were bits of foil chaff that could be found in various nooks and crannies around the course!
Out of curiosity, if this is the doctrine, why doesn't the plane just fire countermeasures automatically?
Here is a link: https://twitter.com/Blue_Sauron/status/1517817773199699977
-- In Military Countermeasures
https://martin-baker.com/products/mk16-ejection-seat-for-raf...
In the picture above you will see a dial for modes. They range from human tell the machine exactly what to do (via the PRGM dial and other switches), to human consent to what the machine wants to do, to machine do what you want to do.
In a more normal combat situation there's a lot more human judgement needed in the use of countermeasures. For example if a fighter locks you up and fires a missile from 50 km away and you fire chaff immediately you might temporarily disrupt their lock, but it's likely that the chaff will disperse and they'll be able to re-lock you before the missile gets anywhere close. You can't just fire them off continuously because it's a limited consumable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8u0q6i/tifu_by_scarin...
And this is why there are armament switching which you turn on only when you enter approved airspace to employ weapons / countermeasures and turn off when you leave (and vocalize on the radio to do so for the rest of the jets in the formation). Then pushing the button which releases weapons or countermeasures does nothing.
> https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44877/ukrainian-fighte...
Just look at this from a risk management perspective. Chance of aircraft being surprise-attacked in extremely well-defended airspace during peacetime: essentially zero. Consequences of that aircraft being surprise-attacked: loss of one aircraft and crew.
Chance of inadvertent release of weapons and/or countermeasures when switched on: apparently not zero, given the trainee's response. (An automatic response that I would be very, very, very pleased to see as an instructor!) Consequences: potential loss of civilian life and/or property.
So you have zero * (1 airplane + 1 crew), versus non-zero * (? civilians + ? buildings). I know which side of that inequality I'm landing on.
Finally, no current potential enemy state has the kind of aircraft carrier fleet needed to perform that the of attack. The U.K. and China both have two active carriers, but the Chinese are still training up. The Japanese launched about 300 planes from six carriers.
Nowadays, any surprise attack on the United States would be a counterforce launch of hundreds of ICBMs and SLBMs with at most twenty minutes of warning to launch a response, and hours to launch a second strike, assuming command and control networks remained active.
The only scenario after the invention of modern surveillance/detection mechanisms I can think of would have been 9/11 and in that case the problem wasn't reaction time but red tape, identification of compromised airplanes and willingness to shoot down civilian planes full of American citizens who might already be trying to recapture the plane.
It's like hearing gunshots outside the window of your house in your very safe hated community because someone thought it would be fun to prank you with a gun with blanks. Do you drive to the ground and maybe hurt yourself or knock some things over and damage them, or do you do nothing convinced that there's no way someone could be firing a gun close by?
I know what I'd do, and it's not the one that relies on a bunch of assumptions going against what the situation is presenting itself as when getting it wrong might mean my death.
Freud would surely be proud.
That was until someone had the brilliant idea to test the radar on an El Al plane...
This must have scared the hell out of the Israeli pilots and it seems this created a small diplomatic incident.
I've flown El Al...but I forgot the brand. In the initial read, I thought you were referring to a fighter plane make (kfir, mirage, sukoi, mig etc) so your story didnt make sense. Your story is more enticing with that context
This is the likeliest explanation for The Great Filter, in my opinion. Civilizations develop power well beyond their wisdom and then snuff themselves out.
I also want them fucking around and not using the weapons in the Middle East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...
I'd guess this was some fairly high level exec.
By the way, the gentleman should be receiving a necktie from Martin Baker.
https://ejectionsite.com/
1: https://omnirole-rafale.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Rappo...
What hasn't been covered in the comments, to my surprise, is the aspect of peer pressure that made him accept the present. This wasn't a gift voucher for a flight in a hot air balloon, so colleagues should have planned for a "plan b" in case he wasn't going to have the flight for fear for his safety. Apparently, social pressure was exercised to coerce him - bad, shame on them!