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I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that c
by airstrike 1y ago
I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that conclusion.
The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"
- codyb 1y agoDoesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session
- HPsquared 1y agoI wonder if the ejection seat has different levels of acceleration depending on the situation.
- borlox 1y agoWhen you're chosing to egress because the plane stops to know where it is or where it isn't, would you want it to decide how fast to eject? Chances are that the ejection system won't get reliable data to decide on in these situations.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoI believe the only relevant factor is airspeed.
- HPsquared 1y agoAirspeed, altitude, vertical speed.
- LorenPechtel 1y agoMake it two motors, they either burn together or they burn one after the other. Neither altitude nor vertical speed is going to matter as you get the same impulse. Airspeed matters as you have to clear the tail.
- the__alchemist 1y agoI've never heard of this, but I imagine it would only make sense as a manual override used explicitly for controlled-ejection scenarios. This incident was almost one of those, but turned into an uncontrolled one.
- Sharlin 1y agoI don't think so. It's a solid rocket motor, there's no modulating such things.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoMany seat types have multiple distinct motors for redundancy reasons. Even if there are not, you can adjust the effective output of a solid rocket motor by modifying the nozzle configuration, and Martin-Baker has an expired patent on this. ... but even if the seat in question was able to adjust the ejection thrust (which I don't think it was), this particular situation involved ejection really close to the ground, which calls for maximum thrust.
- HPsquared 1y agoCar airbags are basically that, and they have different levels of deployment (on a much lower budget).
- keepamovin 1y agoIt risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.
- drdo 1y agoEven if the ejections happened with no fault on your part?
- matusp 1y agoI think it's about health concerns
- pixelfarmer 1y agoYour spine doesn't care why an ejection happened.
- shawabawa3 1y agoAlso isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?
- 542354234235 1y agoThat might also be influenced by the situation which necessitated the ejection. Ejecting in optimal conditions could have a 0.1% fatality rate (not a real statistic), but cases of ejecting from a disintegrating plane at 100 feet probably aren't as safe.
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoNot with modern Martin-Baker seats. IIRC since 2000, something like 800 ejections have happened, of which one lead to a fatality, which was caused by improper maintenance to the seat. (Martin-Baker was chastised for not warning maintainers of the specific risks of overtightening certain bolts above printed spec.) When Russians were still flying planes deep over Ukraine, they have something like a 50% fatality rate on ejection, but that might be exacerbated by Ukrainian locals often finding the ejected pilots before any military force does, and people getting bombed have historically not liked the people flying the bombers much. When a pilot on the ground has a lot of bruises and a snapped neck, it's often hard to identify whether that happened during the ejection, during the landing, or after. And even when the cause was clearly violence, the emergency services might not be overly interested in blaming anyone or anything but the seat.
- zhengyi13 1y agoI've been told that ejections are violent enough that pilots can end up permanently shorter. A short bit of searching turned up this case study of two pilots' injuries/outcomes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9453365/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9453365/
- petertodd 1y agoEjections are pretty rough, and occasionally career or even life ending. So there would be a lot of pressure on the engineers to try to avoid it. Plus, this plane is very expensive. The cost is multiple times the average lifetime earnings of a typical person. It's not entirely wrong to say that they were attempting to save the life's work of multiple people.
- SoftTalker 1y agoAlso the now-pilotless aircraft could potentally kill people on the ground when it crashes. If this had happened in a more populated area it very likely would have.
- chasil 1y agoI imagine that ejecting at certain phases of these two attempts would not be survivable. "The pilot then tried two “touch and go” landings, where the plane briefly lands, to try to straighten out the jammed nose gear, the report said."
- nacnud 1y agoAccording to the ejection seat manufacturer [1] there is no minimum height or speed at which the ejection seat can be used, so as long as the aircraft is roughly level then the ejection should be survivable. [1] https://martin-baker.com/ejection-seats/us16e/ https://martin-baker.com/ejection-seats/us16e/
- dfox 1y agoThe actual report mentions that this was a concern for actually landing the plane (as opposed to touch and go), because there was real possibility that the plane would end up in attitude that can hardly be described as "roughly level".
- jefftk 1y agoI would expect if the aircraft were level at 50 ft above the ground, flying inverted, an ejection would not be survivable.
- palata 1y agoI assume it's what they meant with "as long as the aircraft is roughly level"...
- the__alchemist 1y agoThe main times a "0/0" ejection would be expected to be unsurvivable are going really fast (e.g. breaking the mach), and with some combo of high sink rate and high bank.
- gregoriol 1y agoThe pilot could eject at mostly any time, not if the plane starts spinning uncontrollably though. Also, the plane can become very dangerous to what may be on the ground: if the pilot looses control and must eject it may not always be in a safe place to crash. Or even worse, the plane may continue to fly some distance and crash at a very different place than expected. So yeah, very stressful for everyone involved.