Front Line First?

Enzo Matrix wrote:

Thanks for that info; I remember at the time it was quite the mystery. The Soviets had a somewhat similar incident with a Yak-36M (Yak-38 Forger).Yakolev test pilot Vladilen Khomiakov was test flying one of the aircraft on March 4th, 1976, from Saratov airfield near Moscow; he had taken off vertically, and was beginning to transition into horizontal flight, when at 49 seconds after lift-off, the automatic ejection seat fired for no apparent reason, blowing him out of the aircraft. As he floated down under his chute onto the frozen Volga river he got to watch the Yak, still happily flying with its front lift engines functioning well and its rear lift nozzles at a sixty degree angle, leave the vicinity. Eventually one lift engine quit, but by then it was going fast enough to get lift from its wings, and kept right on flying, heading towards Moscow. Moscow Air Defense had a fit, when they were told it was heading their way. Engine torque or something started to make it bank enough that it flew in a big circle, and climbed up to a maximum altitude of 26,000 ft while flying at around 350 knots as the fuel burned off and lightened it, finally slowing to 121 knots in the thin upper air, stalling, and descending onto a collective farm where it came down almost intact in a belly flop with the main engine still functioning. It caught fire on impact, but a trusty Soviet tractor driver pushed snow onto it and extinguished the flames. It had flown for 18 minutes in a unmanned state. :-)

Pat

Do any of these stories "end with hugs and puppies" or do they chiefly concern recovering human entrails from the branches of nearby trees as related to me by Fl Sgt Jack Hulme back in the 1960's?

(kim)

kim wrote:

They're been some amazingly lucky ejections over the years; one guy punched out of a navy plane while it was submerged; the guy in the U-2 I mentioned fell out of the plane while knocked out, and maybe the all time capper is the pilot of the M-12 "Blackbird" who had the D-21 drone the two man crew just launched (the launch officer drowned after not inflating his neck collar after landing at sea, possibly due to being injured during the plane falling apart) dive clean through the aircraft right after release, and never even ejected... he suddenly found himself flying through near vacuum at around 83,000 feet and Mach 3 as the plane fell apart around him in his seat without ejecting, and got to look back on something that looked to him like tinsel and chaff that was the remains of the Blackbird disintegrating...as he soared fifty miles or so downrange in a matter of seconds before descending ballisticly into the thick part of the atmosphere again. (That's still the all-time record for surviving leaving a aircraft in both the altitude and speed categories) Then, of course, there was the MiG-29 ejection during the Paris Airshow in 1989, which was the damnedest thing people had ever seen; ejecting while going straight down at around 200 mph and around 300 feet up:

result? He sprained his ankle. :-D That ejection seat got the best press imaginable after that incident. I don't know if we ever did it, but we were seriously considering buying it in a modified version from the Russians and sticking it in the F-22 and F-35.

Pat

everytime i see that, i think that's one lucky commie. and it wasn't ripped off tech, correct? weren't they home grown? someone also told me englend did buy some for trials.

That was actually a famous line from a TV show that Enzo is fond of quoting but the joke was apparently was lost on him? :o)

(kim)