13 ms·

A Soviet test pilot ejected two seconds before the crash of his MiG-29 (2019)

106 points by ripvanwinkle 4y ago

system2 4y ago
Title makes it sound like this happened 3 years ago. This accident is from 1989.
- jackblemming 4y ago
  The Soviet part wasn't a giveaway?
  - pestatije 4y ago
    No, i thought the soviet part was wrong, 2019 the time the accident happened.
  - samstave 4y ago
- dang 4y ago
  By HN convention, a year in parens indicates the year of the article, not the topic.
dmitrygr 4y ago
A similar accident for the B2 - pilots ejected mere seconds before impact AFTER their wing was already scratching ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B-2_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...
- fsckboy 4y ago
  the article you linked says it was moments after take-off, so it's maybe less surprising that the wing would be near the ground
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    It was. But it was also moments before a fiery crash. They got airborne and then came down due to a stall due to a few wet sensors and a bad algorithm
- Miserlou57 4y ago
  You can eject… from a B2??
  - chiph 4y ago
    At least on the B-2 they eject upwards. On the B-52 the navigator and radar operator eject downwards (the other crew members eject upwards like you'd expect). The ejection process on the B-52 is complex - it even moves the control columns and work tables out of the way before the seat launches. http://www.ejectionsite.com/b-52.htm http://www.ejectionsite.com/b-52.htm
baybal2 4y ago
[dead]
vxNsr 4y ago
cause of accident was bird strike, the plane was already mere feet from the ground when the engine failed.
t0mas88 4y ago
> Kvochur immediately selected full afterburner for the good engine, but at only 180 km/h (111 mph) he had insufficient rudder and aileron authority to counter the thrust asymmetry and the result was inevitably an irrecoverable departure. Multi-engine aircraft have a known minimal control speed, below the speed you cannot maintain directional control in case of an engine failure with full power from the other engine. The theory is that you can only be below that during the takeoff roll and in case of a problem you have to abort the takeoff (close both throttles) to maintain control. I've never flown military jets, but I expect they have this same concept. Then going full afterburner while below minimum control speed is what put him in an uncontrollable roll.
- tapland 4y ago
  > The theory is that you can only be below that during the takeoff roll and in case of a problem you have to abort the takeoff (close both throttles) to maintain control. Or landing. A famous case is the death of Kara Hultgreen, who suffered a compressor stall and subsequent asymmetric thrust while trying to land a F-14 on an aircraft carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#Death
  - chmod775 4y ago
    Those cases are eerily similar in how both pilots immediately selected full afterburner before ultimately ejecting (or being ejected). Hultgreen just did not survive the ejection.
    - hutrdvnj 4y ago
      From the Wikipedia article: > The radar intercept officer in the rear seat, Lt. Matthew Klemish, initiated ejection for himself and Hultgreen as soon as it was apparent the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable. First in the automated ejection sequence, Klemish survived. However, by the time Hultgreen's seat fired 0.4 seconds later, the plane had exceeded 90 degrees of roll, and she was ejected downward into the water, killing her instantly. It seems that she was just 0.4 seconds too late, otherwise she could have survived like Klemish.
PUSH_AX 4y ago
Can’t access this page on mobile, seems to go into an infinite refresh loop.
- eps 4y ago
  Yep, same here.
- NavinF 4y ago
  It works on Chrome/iOS but refresh loops on Brave/iOS. Both are forced to use the same browser engine by Apple so the main difference is that Brave has a built-in adblocker. I didn't bother to test it with devtools on desktop, but they almost certainly have js on the page that attempts to load analytics/ads and refreshes the page until it succeeds.
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    Loads fine with no ads on Android with Firefox + UBlock Origin
lizardactivist 4y ago
Nerves of steel.
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hammock 4y ago
  It’s a programmatic targeted ad, brother. What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history
  - macintux 4y ago
    Apparently I’m supposedly interested in golf, skin care, and oh so many bracelets. Whatever algorithm is in play is suboptimal.
    - hammock 4y ago
      Optimal for what? Advertising is a two sided market with advertisers bidding on the other side. It could so happen that the bracelet brand was willing to pay more for your eyeballs than any of the brands you actually like. Without knowing the bids there’s no way to evaluate if what was shown was suboptimal
      - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
        > Optimal for what? Useful or correct targeting.
      - macintux 4y ago
        Not optimal for judging my interests at any rate.
  - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
    > It’s a programmatic targeted ad, brother. What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history That'd be startling. I'm as deep blue as it gets, I've never opened any of that Alex Jones stuff, I don't use Facebook, and I was getting "let's go brandon" shirts. Absolutely nothing about my browsing history should lead to that. I mostly look at math stuff, programming stuff, video games, and Netflix. . > What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history I understand why you're saying that, and it makes sense in context But also, I got a four friends on Discord to try it, who are just as blue as I am, and three of them got similarly horse apple paste results.
coldcode 4y ago
A friend of mine in the 90s was there as an F-16 test pilot and saw the accident. He said this sort of problem is a well known risk of being a test pilot so they spend a lot of time on planning how to deal with something bad. He also said they usually left much more daring things to safer places and preferred to keep the air show maneuvers less risky since crashes are not a good marketing plan.
- to11mtm 4y ago
  > He also said they usually left much more daring things to safer places and preferred to keep the air show maneuvers less risky since crashes are not a good marketing plan. Makes sense. Fancy maneuvers at lower altitudes (i.e. Air shows/Public/govt Demos) give less space to correct or safely eject when something goes wrong.
  - Wistar 4y ago
    My first flight instructor, an accomplished aerobatics competitor and air-show performer, had a saying: "Make the difficult look easy, the easy look spectacular, and never attempt the impossible."
- pastaguy1 4y ago
  Since the cause was multiple birdstrikes, I don't know how specific to being a test pilot this episode was. Maybe they do more stuff with higher risk of birdstrike in general, or maybe they didn't yet know the plane's flight envelope, etc., but this would have been a bad day even if the MiG was production at this point, i would think. edit: I guess this plane was already production at this point. maybe i'm confused about what constitutes a test pilot.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Civilian aircraft are speed limited below IIRC 18,000' because of the danger of bird strikes. Military aircraft are no less vulnerable, they just have ejection seats if the pilot loses the game with the birds.
  - 4y ago
GartzenDeHaes 4y ago
Seems to me that the big news from this air show wasn't the crash, but the MiG's IR tracking sensor. It led to a lot of speculation about Soviet countermeasures for stealth aircraft.
Loic 4y ago
For some context, the pilot was Anatoly Kvochur[0], who was, for my understanding, one of the best Russian test pilot. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kvochur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kvochur
- klausjensen 4y ago
  Ukrainian, not Russian.
  - gdy 4y ago
    Kvochur was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, he is Russian by ethnicity, and Soviet and now Russian by nationality. And he is a Russian test pilot who has worked for Sukhoi and MIG. [0] https://warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=4276 https://warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=4276
- trasz 4y ago
  More like Ukrainian, given the birthplace. USSR wasn’t Russia.
  - kqr 4y ago
    I have this rule that if you aren't sure where a famous German was born, it was Austria, and if you aren't sure where a famous French person was born, it was Belgium. Maybe I can add a Russia/Ukraine pair to that?...
    - blevin 4y ago
      After your first example I expected the famous French birth prior to be Corsica.
    - trasz 4y ago
      Quite possibly; Ukraine was a major scientific and engineering hub in USSR. Many of the things we recognise USSR for came from Ukraine, from Mriya to much of the space program. Also, Ukraine is where the civilised part of the Russian civilisation originates - Kyiv is much older than Moscow. I found Kamil Galeev a great resource on all things Russia, see eg https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1553786725025079297 https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1553786725025079297 for a random thread.
stavros 4y ago
This is impressive, but the loud music over the video's commentator was very frustrating. Still, amazing to see the pilot's quick reaction in milliseconds.
djohnston 4y ago
Ukrainian pilots ejected after they hit the ground at an airshow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL697AGVDoM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL697AGVDoM EDIT: Not trying to inflame tensions, just saying there are even crazier "last second" ejections on video
inamberclad 4y ago
I remember an Air Force training video (from youtube, not my professional career sadly) encouraging pilots to eject sooner rather than later. You don't want to be cooked by the fireball of your own jet, after all.
tzs 4y ago
If you like close calls, here's another last second ejection [1]. This one is an F-16 from the US Air Force's "Thunderbirds" demonstration squadron. Ejection was initiated 0.8 seconds before impact. The cause of this was an error by the pilot when setting up for the show. He got the altitude of the airport wrong, thinking it was about 800 ft (~240 m) lower than it really was. Here's a video, showing both inside and outside views [2]. [1] http://www.ejectionsite.com/thunderbird6.htm http://www.ejectionsite.com/thunderbird6.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alo_XWCqNUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alo_XWCqNUQ
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  He fucked up very badly with the altitude, that was a deathly fuck-up, but good that he didn't bail early, you don't want to bail early because you might have made it. It's comparable to being in a death lock, you gotta go for the marginal chance you can wrest yourself out, tap out just before time stops.
- dctoedt 4y ago
  I don't understand how he made full colonel after that. In the Navy, that kind of thing is normally a career-ender. https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=46421 https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=46421 https://www.jetlinx.com/chris-stricklin-today-is-the-tomorrow-i-almost-lost-2/ https://www.jetlinx.com/chris-stricklin-today-is-the-tomorro...

106 points by ripvanwinkle 4y ago

system2 4y ago

Title makes it sound like this happened 3 years ago. This accident is from 1989.

jackblemming 4y ago
The Soviet part wasn't a giveaway?
- pestatije 4y ago
  No, i thought the soviet part was wrong, 2019 the time the accident happened.
- samstave 4y ago
dang 4y ago
By HN convention, a year in parens indicates the year of the article, not the topic.

dmitrygr 4y ago

A similar accident for the B2 - pilots ejected mere seconds before impact AFTER their wing was already scratching ground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B-2_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Andersen_Air_Force_Base_B...

fsckboy 4y ago
the article you linked says it was moments after take-off, so it's maybe less surprising that the wing would be near the ground
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  It was. But it was also moments before a fiery crash. They got airborne and then came down due to a stall due to a few wet sensors and a bad algorithm
Miserlou57 4y ago
You can eject… from a B2??
- chiph 4y ago
  At least on the B-2 they eject upwards. On the B-52 the navigator and radar operator eject downwards (the other crew members eject upwards like you'd expect). The ejection process on the B-52 is complex - it even moves the control columns and work tables out of the way before the seat launches. http://www.ejectionsite.com/b-52.htm http://www.ejectionsite.com/b-52.htm

baybal2 4y ago

[dead]

vxNsr 4y ago

cause of accident was bird strike, the plane was already mere feet from the ground when the engine failed.

t0mas88 4y ago

> Kvochur immediately selected full afterburner for the good engine, but at only 180 km/h (111 mph) he had insufficient rudder and aileron authority to counter the thrust asymmetry and the result was inevitably an irrecoverable departure. Multi-engine aircraft have a known minimal control speed, below the speed you cannot maintain directional control in case of an engine failure with full power from the other engine. The theory is that you can only be below that during the takeoff roll and in case of a problem you have to abort the takeoff (close both throttles) to maintain control. I've never flown military jets, but I expect they have this same concept. Then going full afterburner while below minimum control speed is what put him in an uncontrollable roll.

tapland 4y ago
> The theory is that you can only be below that during the takeoff roll and in case of a problem you have to abort the takeoff (close both throttles) to maintain control. Or landing. A famous case is the death of Kara Hultgreen, who suffered a compressor stall and subsequent asymmetric thrust while trying to land a F-14 on an aircraft carrier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Hultgreen#Death
- chmod775 4y ago
  Those cases are eerily similar in how both pilots immediately selected full afterburner before ultimately ejecting (or being ejected). Hultgreen just did not survive the ejection.
  - hutrdvnj 4y ago
    From the Wikipedia article: > The radar intercept officer in the rear seat, Lt. Matthew Klemish, initiated ejection for himself and Hultgreen as soon as it was apparent the aircraft was becoming uncontrollable. First in the automated ejection sequence, Klemish survived. However, by the time Hultgreen's seat fired 0.4 seconds later, the plane had exceeded 90 degrees of roll, and she was ejected downward into the water, killing her instantly. It seems that she was just 0.4 seconds too late, otherwise she could have survived like Klemish.

PUSH_AX 4y ago

Can’t access this page on mobile, seems to go into an infinite refresh loop.

eps 4y ago
Yep, same here.
NavinF 4y ago
It works on Chrome/iOS but refresh loops on Brave/iOS. Both are forced to use the same browser engine by Apple so the main difference is that Brave has a built-in adblocker. I didn't bother to test it with devtools on desktop, but they almost certainly have js on the page that attempts to load analytics/ads and refreshes the page until it succeeds.
- Larrikin 4y ago
  Loads fine with no ads on Android with Firefox + UBlock Origin

lizardactivist 4y ago

Nerves of steel.

JohnHaugeland 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hammock 4y ago
It’s a programmatic targeted ad, brother. What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history
- macintux 4y ago
  Apparently I’m supposedly interested in golf, skin care, and oh so many bracelets. Whatever algorithm is in play is suboptimal.
  - hammock 4y ago
    Optimal for what? Advertising is a two sided market with advertisers bidding on the other side. It could so happen that the bracelet brand was willing to pay more for your eyeballs than any of the brands you actually like. Without knowing the bids there’s no way to evaluate if what was shown was suboptimal
    - JohnHaugeland 4y ago
      > Optimal for what? Useful or correct targeting.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Not optimal for judging my interests at any rate.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  > It’s a programmatic targeted ad, brother. What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history That'd be startling. I'm as deep blue as it gets, I've never opened any of that Alex Jones stuff, I don't use Facebook, and I was getting "let's go brandon" shirts. Absolutely nothing about my browsing history should lead to that. I mostly look at math stuff, programming stuff, video games, and Netflix. . > What shows up in that space is a fault of your own browsing history I understand why you're saying that, and it makes sense in context But also, I got a four friends on Discord to try it, who are just as blue as I am, and three of them got similarly horse apple paste results.

coldcode 4y ago

A friend of mine in the 90s was there as an F-16 test pilot and saw the accident. He said this sort of problem is a well known risk of being a test pilot so they spend a lot of time on planning how to deal with something bad. He also said they usually left much more daring things to safer places and preferred to keep the air show maneuvers less risky since crashes are not a good marketing plan.

to11mtm 4y ago
> He also said they usually left much more daring things to safer places and preferred to keep the air show maneuvers less risky since crashes are not a good marketing plan. Makes sense. Fancy maneuvers at lower altitudes (i.e. Air shows/Public/govt Demos) give less space to correct or safely eject when something goes wrong.
- Wistar 4y ago
  My first flight instructor, an accomplished aerobatics competitor and air-show performer, had a saying: "Make the difficult look easy, the easy look spectacular, and never attempt the impossible."
pastaguy1 4y ago
Since the cause was multiple birdstrikes, I don't know how specific to being a test pilot this episode was. Maybe they do more stuff with higher risk of birdstrike in general, or maybe they didn't yet know the plane's flight envelope, etc., but this would have been a bad day even if the MiG was production at this point, i would think. edit: I guess this plane was already production at this point. maybe i'm confused about what constitutes a test pilot.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Civilian aircraft are speed limited below IIRC 18,000' because of the danger of bird strikes. Military aircraft are no less vulnerable, they just have ejection seats if the pilot loses the game with the birds.
- 4y ago

GartzenDeHaes 4y ago

Seems to me that the big news from this air show wasn't the crash, but the MiG's IR tracking sensor. It led to a lot of speculation about Soviet countermeasures for stealth aircraft.

Loic 4y ago

For some context, the pilot was Anatoly Kvochur[0], who was, for my understanding, one of the best Russian test pilot. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kvochur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kvochur

klausjensen 4y ago
Ukrainian, not Russian.
- gdy 4y ago
  Kvochur was born in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, he is Russian by ethnicity, and Soviet and now Russian by nationality. And he is a Russian test pilot who has worked for Sukhoi and MIG. [0] https://warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=4276 https://warheroes.ru/hero/hero.asp?Hero_id=4276
trasz 4y ago
More like Ukrainian, given the birthplace. USSR wasn’t Russia.
- kqr 4y ago
  I have this rule that if you aren't sure where a famous German was born, it was Austria, and if you aren't sure where a famous French person was born, it was Belgium. Maybe I can add a Russia/Ukraine pair to that?...
  - blevin 4y ago
    After your first example I expected the famous French birth prior to be Corsica.
  - trasz 4y ago
    Quite possibly; Ukraine was a major scientific and engineering hub in USSR. Many of the things we recognise USSR for came from Ukraine, from Mriya to much of the space program. Also, Ukraine is where the civilised part of the Russian civilisation originates - Kyiv is much older than Moscow. I found Kamil Galeev a great resource on all things Russia, see eg https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1553786725025079297 https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1553786725025079297 for a random thread.

stavros 4y ago

This is impressive, but the loud music over the video's commentator was very frustrating. Still, amazing to see the pilot's quick reaction in milliseconds.

djohnston 4y ago

Ukrainian pilots ejected after they hit the ground at an airshow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL697AGVDoM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL697AGVDoM EDIT: Not trying to inflame tensions, just saying there are even crazier "last second" ejections on video

inamberclad 4y ago

I remember an Air Force training video (from youtube, not my professional career sadly) encouraging pilots to eject sooner rather than later. You don't want to be cooked by the fireball of your own jet, after all.

tzs 4y ago

If you like close calls, here's another last second ejection [1]. This one is an F-16 from the US Air Force's "Thunderbirds" demonstration squadron. Ejection was initiated 0.8 seconds before impact. The cause of this was an error by the pilot when setting up for the show. He got the altitude of the airport wrong, thinking it was about 800 ft (~240 m) lower than it really was. Here's a video, showing both inside and outside views [2]. [1] http://www.ejectionsite.com/thunderbird6.htm http://www.ejectionsite.com/thunderbird6.htm [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alo_XWCqNUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alo_XWCqNUQ

daniel-cussen 4y ago
He fucked up very badly with the altitude, that was a deathly fuck-up, but good that he didn't bail early, you don't want to bail early because you might have made it. It's comparable to being in a death lock, you gotta go for the marginal chance you can wrest yourself out, tap out just before time stops.
dctoedt 4y ago
I don't understand how he made full colonel after that. In the Navy, that kind of thing is normally a career-ender. https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=46421 https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/wiki.php?id=46421 https://www.jetlinx.com/chris-stricklin-today-is-the-tomorrow-i-almost-lost-2/ https://www.jetlinx.com/chris-stricklin-today-is-the-tomorro...