A video has been doing the rounds on social media which here in Pak purports to be of this crash, although as the date on the YouTube link shows, its actually an earlier crash.
The quality is relatively poor, being amateur phone camera footage from 2010, but what strikes me is that you see the plane taking off, the aircraft then disappears from view and then you see the plane almost hovering, while the pilot ejects then the aircraft seemingly flies on its own to the left before crashing.
Seems to me the pilot lost his or her nerve and ejected early?
After the bird hits the airplane, the pilot needs to make a very quick decision as at those altitudes you don’t have much time to react. Hindsight is 20/20 but the plane could just have easily plummeted to the ground in a fireball in moments. A pilot is more valuable than the aircraft.
I’m not a pilot, but one thing I’ve learned from YouTube is the concept of the “impossible turn”. At a low altitude engine failure like that, it’s tempting to try to return to the runway, but you just don’t have enough altitude and speed to make it. No matter what you do, the plane is going down. Even though that plane flew for a decent distance, it wasn’t going back to the runway.
There’s also the issue that if the pilot ejects from too low of an altitude, the chute won’t have a chance to open and the pilot will end up going SPLAT on the ground. Wait too long to eject, and you’re dead.
From the vantage point of that video, we can’t see what the terrain is like behind the camera, but I suspect that there simply weren’t any decent landing areas available. The pilot realized that the plane was doomed and punched out while he still had enough altitude to survive. That’s my non-pilot guess, anyway.
I think that was his point, though: the plane looked like it was in an imminent stall, then after he ejected, the plane seemed to accelerate to a speed where it could have kept flying, except it didn’t have anyone at the controls so it crashed.
Right, but the bolded word are the key words. It looked like it was going to fail immediately. At such a low altitude, there’s not a lot of time to think about it. Imagine an alternate reality where the pilot doesn’t eject, he tries to recover and the plane nosedives, explodes and kills the pilot. People would be looking at this alternate video and saying “Gee, it sure seems like he had plenty of time to eject. Why did he try to save this doomed plane?”
I think the video is a bit misleading. When the pilot ejected the plane was in a stall.
After the pilot ejects, the camera focuses on the pilot for a moment and then goes back to the plane. When the camera goes back to the plane, it zooms out quickly, giving the impression that the plane had picked up speed but it had not. It was still moving too slowly to recover and crashed.
That is an interesting vid. It almost seems like a composite of two different accident sequences.
It definitely jumps from the camera POV at the ejection to watching the aircraft fly away and seeing the impact occur in the distance behind some trees, followed a moment later by viewing the post-crash fire from up close looking though a gap in a wall. So more than one camera location is involved.
Gosh those comments are lame. Even setting aside the fanboys vs. haters junk.
At the moment the pilot ejects we see the airplane has well below-normal forward speed. Which supports the idea that he was having engine or control problems, whether from bird ingestion or some other issue.
The drill in a single engine jet on takeoff is pretty simple: if the engine hiccups after you’re too far along to stop, zoom as best you can and jump out just before the airplane apogees. There isn’t time for any reaction other than that. As we used to say: “If the jet’s suddenly trying to kill you, just give it back to the taxpayers.”
The ejection seat on the model used by Pakistan had/has a fairly modern ejection seat. Good thing; had that guy been sitting on the original Soviet MiG-21 seat he’d have been dead. The comments that he apparently survived is good news; it was still a close thing. No info on whether “survived” included being able to walk again.
My tentative thought is that just as he jumped out the engine problem, perhaps a compressor stall, cleared up. So the airplane was back to full power and, running purely on luck, flew itself out of the pilot’s zoom at least for a few seconds.
Another possibility is an afterburner blowout. I once had one early in the takeoff roll while still totally glued to the ground. The engine keeps running but the AB quits. The sudden decrement in acceleration feels like you’re slowing down even though you’re still accelerating pretty well on normal no-burner max thrust. In my case it was simple and unequivocal; snap the throttle to idle & get on the wheel brakes.
If it happens once airborne that scenario oughta be flyable*, but you need to correctly diagnose that the engine is still running but the AB isn’t. And quickly retard the throttle out of AB. If you leave it up in AB range and somehow the AB relights with an unknown and uncontrolled flow of fuel back there it can destroy the engine, blow the ass end of the airplane apart, or worse.
I could imagine somebody having a burner blowout just after liftoff, misdiagnose it as a full engine failure, zoom & jump out, only to have the airplane fly away under partial power. At least for a few seconds until the lack of pilot lets it drive itself into the ground.
As fast as it looks like it’s receding from the camera once unpiloted, that’s actually a long way below normal flight speed. The thing is staggering slowly (150 knots??) rather than flying normal fighter climbout speeds (250-350 knots). As it starts the final descent we see mushing flight despite very little G. IOW slow; real slow.
Odds are that had he stayed with it the airplane would have impacted pretty close to where it did. Probably more aligned with the runway but no further downrange.
All in all, stuff happens fast. The jet breaks ground at 0:12 into the vid. He pulls the eject handle at about 0:22 and by 0:24 is leaving the aircraft. The jet hits the ground at 0:39. Somewhere between 0:12 & 0:22 a problem happens, he analyses it rightly or wrongly, decides to zoom & eject, announces his situation to his trailing wingman who starts to evade, zooms, and ejects. In 10 seconds flat.
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Depending on why the burner blew out. Something is real wrong with fuel supply or important parts or nozzle scheduling if the burner quits. Those other things *could *leave you with only far less than full non-AB power available. Probably not enough to fly on.
There’s a retaining net at the end of the runway. Is that the usual practice for these kinds of takeoff? If this were a landing, I’d understand its presence, but even then a normal landing shouldn’t have it up.
Yup. I think its the same person, however, he switched off the camera, moved to an new position to observe the post crash the post crash activity and resumed filming. In the uploaded video those have been stiched together.
Par for the course for India-Pak military videos I am afraid.
So if you were sitting on the board of inquiry for the crash, you would say what? “You could have saved it?” Or “got out at the right time even if you could have saved it” or “you were screwed, good job ejecting when you did”.
Is a pilot really? Seems like the cost of training a pilot (and that there is never a shortage of people who want to fly fighters) makes the pilot less valuable than a $20-50 million fighter.
Not saying the pilot shouldn’t eject, of course, or that not ejecting would save a doomed airplane necessarily, but just questioning this - I have read the “a pilot is worth more than his fighter” aphorism elsewhere and wondered if it was really so from a practical standpoint. There is, of course, psychological value in morale too; pilots wouldn’t like a culture in which they know their lives are considered worth less than an aircraft.
Different services and different bases have different standards.
Some places install barrier nets just after the end of the actual runway, just into the overrun area that still looks, to the layman, like ordinary pavement. If so, those are left raised permanently. Likewise on airfields where the runway is much longer than needed for the aircraft stationed there. They can just erect a barrier after the last turnoff a non-emergency might need and leave it up.
There’s not really any difference between takeoffs and landings in terms of need for a barrier. Fighters have minimal redundancy and relatively crappy undersized wheels, tires, and brakes. The inability to stop normally can happen on either a landing or a takeoff with about equal probability. In fact takeoffs are more likely to be going faster farther down the runway than are landings, and are hence more likely to need the far-end barrier.
Also, for at least some landings the problem can be anticipated, e.g. inflight hydraulic problems. For other landings it’ll be a surprise when the pilot applies wheel brakes and gets little or no response. For takeoffs there’s never going to be much warning; it’ll always be a surprise. So if one was going to raise a barrier just in case a surprise happens, it’d be smart to do that more for takeoffs than for landings.
Last of all, unlike an aircraft carrier which does all takeoffs or all landings for an hour plus at a time (wiki), a typical airport or airbase is using the runway for both operations alternately or nearly so.
Can’t say much definitive with just the video evidence. The rest of the testimony and hardware investigation would help a lot. But my early returns are somewhere between Doors #2 & #3.
There’s always a tension between following written policy versus ad libbing the response to an emergency. Management *really *hates it when you ad lib and something bad happens. When you ad lib and save a marginal situation they’re torn between giving an atta boy for saving the day and a “bad dog!” for not following procedures.
USAF had a case like that awhile ago on the A-10:Procedure on the A-10 with dual hydraulic failure is to jump out. The engineers say the backup fully manual unboosted controls are not aerodynamically powerful enough to ensure control at landing speeds. They’re only enough to let you maintain control and fly to a friendly safe place to jump out in a controlled fashion.
Eventually somebody had that failure and tried to land and succeeded. The pilot was a very highly experienced A-10 guy and he got a lot of informal and semi-official atta boys for saving the jet. How Yeagertastic of him.
About 6 months later, after the story had had a chance to percolate around the A-10 community, some younger pilot had the same problem, tried to land it, and lost control on short final and was killed in the ensuing crash.
As part of the inquiry USAF questioned the first pilot. Who said that it had been a very near thing for him and in hindsight he’d done something very foolish. He was just very lucky to have had no winds or turbulence to contend with near the ground. Unlike the second guy.
Suddenly the official & semi-official attitude became very different. Jump out of these situations or face the music.As applied to the video that drives the official line to something like this:
Did you accurately diagnose your problem? Yes = atta boy, no = bad dog.
Did you follow the procedures for your diagnosis? Yes = atta boy, no = bad dog.
I remain convinced (preponderance of evidence standard) that the airplane was probably unsavable. In which case he jumped out at the right time per what I expect his procedures to have been.
In terms of raw dollars, individual pilots cost less than individual airplanes. Given the relative paucity of ejections, the balance becomes one between:
A) Losing X number of fighters and X minus some small number of pilots because they almost all jump out mostly successfully.
OR
B) X minus some small number of saved fighters plus almost X pilots who choose to stay with doomed aircraft.
The aggregate cost of marginal pilots lost vs marginal aircraft saved probably leans towards policies favoring outcome A.
Back in the heady days of the Century series fighters and USAF/USN aircraft being bought in lots of hundreds per year the calculus was much more that aircraft are quickly & easily replaced, whereas pilots are slow and difficult to replace.
I suspect the attitude has shifted more slowly than the reality has. Looking just at hardware, losing a B-2 is almost as big a deal as losing a middle-sized USN ship.
See also my comments above about the USAF A-10. Management ought to do the thing that produces the globally optimal outcome, not necessarily the locally optimal outcome for each varying circumstance. Of necessity they have to paint with a broad brush.
Maybe not in dollar value, but it takes quite some time to train a capable pilot and there’s a limited pool of people who can (and are willing to) do it. Additionally, you cannot buy experience, so maybe a pilot flying for their first time might not have much “value” but a veteran pilot is worth a lot.
And of course, that’s ignoring that a person’s life is simply worth more than a machine (beepbeep … shush my little AI, I’m not talking about you … beepbeep) and the morale factors, which you mentioned.
That’s a lot less true now in general though than in WWII, especially the time factor. It’s relatively easy to estimate the relative cost of planes. For example US GDP in 1944 was around $225bil and the mass produced single engine fighter types cost in the neighborhood of $50k, 4.5mil:1. Now US GDP is around $18tril and new fighters cost order of $100mil*, 180k:1. The cost of training pilots has probably gone up faster than inflation or GDP per capita growth but I doubt by that 25:1 ratio v all economic activity. There’s obviously just a lot more to a modern fighter, bigger, stuffed with a lot more equipment that’s costly to develop and produce, but still one pilot (in many cases).
But the lead time to produce a new plane of a new design is now far longer than it takes to train a pilot, no doubt about that. The time to produce another unit of a plane already in production is probably still more than it takes to basically train a pilot, maybe not as long as it takes to produce a well seasoned peacetime pilot. But nowadays a lot of years there isn’t a plane of each type in production, and replacement may indeed come only with a new model.
Although it still depends on the specific plane. This was a P-7PG per media accounts, a Chinese made MiG-21 derivative. Those were delivered to the PAF from the early 2000’s so aren’t ancient like original MiG-21’s (though are still ancient by WWII standards) and also relatively capable in the MiG-21 family. But it was very cheap for its time and a type the PAF would like to replace before many more years.
If OTOH the USAF loses an F-22 (especially with it out of production), or the PLAAF one of their first operational J-20’s (even though in production) with a pilot, say a typical pilot for those a/c (presumably among their best, but let’s say it’s not a major leader) it’s debatable if the pilot loss was worse in terms of what economic resources and time are needed to replace each. In moral terms (both ‘morality’ moral and ‘morale’ moral) it’s more complicated obviously.
*there accounting wrinkles to this, whether to include R&D and production rate, which particular a/c. The WWII fighters had the advantage of massive production rate, but that’s just one of the differences between then and now. Factoring in R&D you can get higher costs for recent US fighters than $100mil, but adding one replacement unit doesn’t require more R&D. Flyaway cost of recent F-35’s is not far from $100mil, the goal is $85mil but that refers to a baseline year, it won’t be $85mil nominal dollars when, and if, they get there.
Re the Barrier ; here is the basein question, its next to a mid sized city so I wonder if that affects the barrier issue? LSLGuy, how would the ejection affect the jet’s center of gravity? I presume there would be a change. Could such a change have caused the stall to resolve as it seemingly did in the video?
Supposed to be replaced with JF-17 by early next decade.
F-7PG was the result of the PAF asking various Chinese and European company’s if “they could take a MiG-21 and make it as capable as an F16”. And they succeeded in some aspects (not so much in others). Its already at the limits of design, it is a bigger aircraft than the MiG-21 for a more powerful engine, more fuel, store stations, spine for avionics, a bigger nose for a newer RADAR. From what I have read, it’s a capable A/C, but an unforgiving one.
CG will shift aft significantly post-ejection, and aircraft gross weight will be decreased.
I *believe *an aft-CG condition will make recovery from a developed stall more difficult, but I’ll let the resident pilots confirm or deny that belief (IANAP).
beep … shush my little AI, I’m not talking about you … beep 
beep) and the morale factors, which you mentioned.