Earlier at Mountain Home AFB in Utah, an F-16 of the USAF demo team failed to recover from a vertical manuver and crashed. The pilot punched out and survived.
-
-
Thank God he's okay
The Thunderbirds did a great job at Reno this year. Thankfully the pilot is okay and no one on the ground was injured... -
Mountain Home AFB is just 50 miles down the road
I was not there, but my buddy was working crowd control when it happened. After the crash, the crowd was totally silent thinking that the pilot had perished in the crash. Then they saw a figure dressed in red waving to the left of the crash scene. It was the pilot and the crowd cheered wildly. Everyone was really releived that he was okay.
The local channel news covered only this story and show the crash over and over at different speeds.
Thank God that no one was killed or injured.Visit Mariah95.comComment
-
Is there any chance this footage is posted online somewhere?
It's not every day we hear of a crash with a happy ending.
Comment
-
You may need to give them your email to sign on, but here's a link:
MichaelComment
-
Watch Very Carefully in the Video
You can see the canapy explode and chute and pilot ejection just before the crash.Visit Mariah95.comComment
-
The most amazing aspect of this crash will very likely go un-noticed by most people -- the safe ejection.
The ACES II seat is designed to provide zero/zero ejection capability (zero airspeed from zero altitude), but it has significantly degraded capabilities whenever there is a sink rate at ejection. In other words, from level flight it works great, but whenever you're headed toward the earth, chances for safe ejection are reduced.
In the Eagle, we briefed that if we had any type of ejection situation immediately following takeoff, we would get out of the airplane before a sink rate developed. Below about 2,000 feet chances of survival are significantly decreased with a vector toward the ground.
Anyway, as you saw on the video, the pilot punches out near 100 feet AGL with a significant negative VVI....and STILL manages to get the chute open and one "swing" under the canopy before hitting the dirt.
So...what this tells me is two things:
1) the ACES II is an amazingly capable ejection seat (what they're telling us pilots is obviously very conservative!), even in some seriously undesirable situations, and
2) Thunderbird 6 is lucky that he pulled the handles in a timely fashon, otherwise he would not be with us today.Comment
-
We've come a long way from the F-104A! PeasRutan Long EZ, N-LONG
World Speed Record HolderComment
-
My fiance was very concerned when she heard about this T-bird plane going in. The pilot was in the room across the hall from us at the Silver Legacy and he calmly answered all her questions in the elevator one morning (he was a movie star in that bright red uniform as far as she was concerned).
It's cool how she personalized the whole experience. Glad to hear he is fine.
DonComment
Comment