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The ejector seats that fire through the floor
- quercusa 4y agoI've always been fascinated by the F-104. It looks fast even on the ground. Cockpit: http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html http://www.nmusafvirtualtour.com/cockpits/CW_tour/CW-22.html
- CoastalCoder 4y agoI went to that museum (U.S.A.F. museum in Dayton, OH). If you like warplanes, I highly recommend it. It's an incredible value for your money, and you get to be up close and personal with tons of amazing planes (SR-71, YF-23, B-52, etc.) You definitely want to give yourself two days.
- WalterBright 4y agoMe too. It just looks awesome. A cockpit bolted on to a ginormous engine. It's a totally bad-ass airplane.
- TylerE 4y agoStill not quite as cool as a Lightning, though.
- WalterBright 4y agoI suppose you could compare the Starfighter to the Gee-Bee as they are the same concept, but the Gee-Bee always looked like something out of a pulp magazine rather than a mean mo-fo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Super_Sportster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Gee_Bee_Model_R_Supe... The P-38 is cool, too :-)
- TylerE 4y agoI was referring to the English Electric variety
- WalterBright 4y agoOk :-)
- speed_spread 4y agoI'm also terrified by that wing aspect ratio. Fast it must have been, but it seems that they sacrificed a lot of common (flying) sense to get there.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI know so little about this but aren’t fighters much more ballistic in order to be nimble? My loose amateur sense is that a fighter pilot is always flirting with their plane no-longer behaving like a plane and more like a guided missile if they flew it just the slightest wrong (or right?) way.
- lmm 4y agoYou're thinking of something different. Modern (computer-controlled) fighters are aerodynamically unstable because that makes them more manouverable, but that's about being able to turn or spin rather than flying balistically. For traditionally-shaped planes (delta wings work differently) there's a fairly straightforward tradeoff between big wings to increase lift at low speeds and small wings to reduce drag at high speed. Flaps help but there's a limit to how much you can change the shape of a wing in flight. So if you build a plane to go very fast, you tend to end up with a plane that has a high minimum speed as well, which makes take off and especially landing difficult.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThank you. To simplify, are you basically saying that with more unstable wing configurations, at slower speeds the plane simply wants to fall out of the sky rather than glide? Is that sensible to imagine for this topic?
- lmm 4y agoIt's not "unstable", it's low-lift, those are two orthogonal concerns.
- WalterBright 4y ago
- implements 4y agoI have a fascination for the similar looking T38 Talon: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwards_AFB.jpg#/media/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwards_AFB.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:T-38_Talon_over_Edwa... - still used for US fast jet training, apparently.
- buildbot 4y agoLove how there’s a gauge for airspeed in raw mach numbers, up to mach 4!
- arwhatever 4y agoWow, I knew that modern ejector seats had this gyroscopic capability, but had no idea the Soviets pioneered it.
- s3p 4y agoThanks for the submission, this was a fascinating read. Had no idea of the interesting history behind in-flight ejection systems.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoVideo lecture on the history of Martin-Baker ejection seats, given by a Martin-Baker executive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzWAM5uWxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzWAM5uWxQ He gives a nice high-level overview of the company's product line, what sort of features were introduced with new seats and why.
- xwdv 4y agoWould it have been a war crime to fly back and shoot out a pilot who had ejected?
- bpodgursky 4y agoProbably not, but it would be pretty hard to find a pilot willing to do this.
- happyopossum 4y agoNo, in fact it is explicitly identified as a war crime by the Geneva convention. Air crew abandoning a plane are distinct from airborne paratroopers in this regard - for obvious reasons.
- fsckboy 4y agonot obvious at all. An ejected pilot over enemy territory, ok, but an ejected pilot over his home territory, seems like still a combatant to me.
- charcircuit 4y agoI agree that it's not obvious. No one can shoot you, but you can still shoot other people. It's pretty much gives them god mode.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> No one can shoot you, but you can still shoot other people. This isn’t true. If you start shooting people it’s perfidy and you become a combatant again and they can shoot you.
- charcircuit 4y agoThen just temporarily surrender after each shot. The game designers didn't add any kind of cooldown as far as I can tell so you can abuse the mechanic. There are just some restrictions in who you can shoot depending on if they take actions based off you surrendering.
- defrost 4y agoIn other ejection related stories: > Luxury British watchmakers Bremont are the founders of an interesting tradition. Alongside fellow Brits, aerospace company Martin-Baker, whose construction and supply of ejector seats dominate 70% of the global market, they co-design a signature special edition variant of Bremont’s MBII watch. > Given their rich affinity with the aviation industry from day dot, Bremont’s aim was to over-engineer one of their timepieces in collaboration with Martin-Baker to withstand the incomprehensible forces felt by the human body when ejecting from an aircraft. These watches, known as MBI, would then be numerically engraved and awarded to any of Martin-Baker’s success stories. Few watches would have the need to endure extreme temperature changes from -40 to 40 degrees Celsius, or rapid altitude pressures up to 100,000 feet, let alone atomic-level shock testing and prolonged salt water exposure. Bremont Founder Nick English says of the rationale behind the watch, “with the testing and development behind us, both Martin-Baker and Bremont felt that for those pilots who have successfully ejected from a fighter aircraft (it really is a special and elite club), a bespoke and equally special watch would commemorate this well.” [site] https://bremont.com/products/mbi https://bremont.com/products/mbi [article] https://www.bosshunting.com.au/style/watches/bremont-ejection-timepiece/ https://www.bosshunting.com.au/style/watches/bremont-ejectio...*
- bongoman37 4y agoWhat's atomic level shock testing? Sounds like marketingspeak.
- sundvor 4y agoAs awesome# as that timepiece is, isn't this a bit like buying a dash cam after an incident? :) #) It's almost an incentive to ditch.
- starfallg 4y agoMore ditching mean more seats, which suits them fine.
- jacobn 4y agoAdditional quote from the article: “People will tell you that you don’t generally eject when you think you’re going to die, you eject only when you know you’re gonna die.”
- slyall 4y agoI remember a comic where a pilot had to get out of P-38 Lightning. Earlier in the comic another pilot had hit the boom when bailing out. He got the inspiration of inverting the aircraft so gravity helped him clear the aircraft's boom.
- WalterBright 4y agoEven in conventional fighter aircraft, pilots would be killed from hitting the rudder or the stabilizer, or in some horrible cases, their chute would get caught on the tail and pull the hapless pilot down with it.
- jabl 4y agoAs another anecdote, IIRC the Avro Lancaster crew escape hatch was found to be too small when wearing a parachute. Probably a non-trivial number of crew met their end trapped inside the aircraft. There were IIRC plans to fix it, but they didn't want a hiccup in production due to implementing the fix, so it was never fixed.
- phire 4y agoThe development of the Avro Manchester (and then Lancaster) was a bit of a mess. The first Manchester prototype flew just five weeks before WW2 started, and might have been rushed into production. But there were major flaws with the reliability and power of the engines, and Avro were already working on the Lancaster to replace the Manchester before the first production models even entered service. The Lancaster is simply a Manchester, with the two Rolls-Royce Vulture engines replaced by four Merlin engines.
- jabl 4y agoIIRC from reading some WWII pilot memoirs that the recommended procedure was to pull up (to bleed off speed), unbuckle, and then push the stick forwards, and the negative G would throw the pilot out of the cockpit. Might be a bit more difficult in reality with the plane on fire and missing control surfaces, though.
- quijoteuniv 4y agoI have always been attracted to fighter planes, the technologies developed and skills needed to fly them. These days I just wonder when the human being is going to stop building machines to inflict most possible damage to other human beings. Is 10000 years enough? I wish a universal wave of metanoia would cristalize on earth and all the might and magic of tje human would be use for a better purpose
- lazide 4y agoIt’s a fundamental part of survival, it’s never going to end anymore than Bears will ever evolve to not have teeth.
- onion2k 4y agoI was going to post to say you must have quite a low opinion of the human race to suggest we maximize our destructive capabilities because we have no choice and can't do anything about it, but on reflection the opposite is true. At least if we have no choice in the matter and it's just "who we are" we can carry on without worrying about it too much. Believing we could be peaceful but we choose not to be is far worse.
- rocqua 4y agoThe need for destructive capabilities isn't inate to our 'design'. It's more fundamental than that. It comes from the fact that cooperation is unreliable, and the fact that sometimes 'the greater good' means individual sacrifices that individuals may not agree with. If humans were a hive mind where cooperation was assured, you'd still need destructive capabilities against the environment, and perhaps other species. That humans strive for the capacity of violence doesn't surprise or sadden me. What does sadden me is that much of our pinacle of technological development happens with the explicit goal of violent capacity. And the fact that rough parity in our violent capacity is generally the only thing keeping big states from expansion.
- lazide 4y ago
- pgreenwood 4y agoI would think we should call ejector seats that fire through the floor "rejector seats".
- bennyp101 4y agoThe ending about helicopters got me - I guess I had always assumed that they had some sort of way to get out, but not really put much thought into it. "Attack helicopters are flying so low that by the time you make the decision to eject and move to take action, you're probably dead anyway, so why add the weight, complexity, vulnerability, cost of an escape system that's almost never likely to be used."
- wrp 4y agoNot an expert, but I think that part is wrong. You can still do a controlled landing with a severely damaged helicopter. If the damage is so bad you can't, perhaps ejection is not really an option either.
- toyg 4y ago> If the damage is so bad you can't, perhaps ejection is not really an option either. That's what the article is saying: if you're in an unrecoverable situation, there is no time or space to eject either.