Sunday, April 10, 2011
Serious Business
This Canadian F-18 mishap took place last year. The photo sequence is remarkable. One could not accuse the pilot of abandoning ship too early.
The canopy comes off with a pair of rockets.
The pilot ejects from the aircraft at a high rate of descent and at roughly 90 degrees of bank. His trajectory is roughly horizontal.
The seat vectors the rockets to vertical to provide adequate chute opening time. The small white drogue chute is already deployed to stabilize the seat/pilot and separate him laterally from the aircraft.
The final component, the ground enters the picture to tell the whole story of how impressive this technology is.
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4 comments:
My number of landings exactly equals my number of takeoffs for which I am grateful, but I also was grateful for Mssrs Martin and Baker's wonderful invention and the subsequent Aces II.
That's gonna require a larger-than-usual divot repair tool.
Juvat: Ditto here. The people let me borrow the vehicle and I always brought it back. Occasionally it was a little worse for wear, but always repairable.
In other news, a US military report says pilots operating the well-known Predator drone aircraft suffer far higher levels of mental stress than flyboys who are physically present aboard their planes.
Apparently that report was compiled by people who never saw these pics.
If your drone crashes in Afghanistan, do you still have to jump out of your chair in Louisiana?
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