Forum: Military Aircraft of the Cold War

Anyone know the story behind this pic?

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F-14D (Note canopy breakers on the NACES seat.) As I heard it from the first email I got with it this was an incentive flight for someone. The back seater needed to do something where he loosened his lap belt for motion, then the pilot did a maneuver where there was minor negative G force involved. The incentive rider floated out of the seat partway and reached down to grab the nearest handle to pull himself down. Unfortunately it was the seat firing handle and as per SOP was armed. He got a nice ride on a MB SJU-17 followed by a GQ-1000 parachute, followed by getting his a$$ chewed off for costing over $100,000 in damages to the aircraft. (new seat + canopy).

Kevin
The Ejection Site

With incidents like this it is no wonder it's so hard to get an incentive flight ... Sad

Yeah...just when you think you're about to get the OK someone does somethin' patently stupid and drops a te*d in the punchbowl. Mad

Where's the picture at?

The link is kinda slow. Be patient and it will appear.

I'd think it would be a lot more than $100,000. I don't blame the military for being so picky about who gets a ride!

I doubt you could even do that in a 16 as you would be getting the full air blast, with no wind screen to duck behind!!

Good way to blow the dust out of the cockpit!

SwedgeII wrote:

I doubt you could even do that in a 16 as you would be getting the full air blast, with no wind screen to duck behind!!

The HUD combiner on the -16 is intended to be used as a backup windscreen. I know of one case where the canopy and HUD were damaged in a birdstrike, with about 65% of the canopy gone (right up the center, from the front lip to behind the pilot) and the pilot flew the aircraft into a safe landing. Got a photo of the canopy somewhere on one of my other computers.

btw, Parrothead the seat alone is more than $100,000. I used that figure because it is the boundry for a Class B mishap. I don't have exact prices on the NACES seat, but I know it is well over $100,000.

Kevin
The Ejection Site

kmceject, I don't know about the different classes of mishaps, but I understand what you're saying. I remember JR007 saying that the cost to overhaul each seat for the team's new Zipper is about $100,000, so I gathered that a whole new seat for a jet like the Tomcat would be a lot more. Thanks for the info! Also, I'd love to see that picture of the F-16's damaged canopy and HUD if you can find it! Have fun!

If it costs 100K to overhaul ejection seats, then maybe I've just found the high profit niche market I've been looking to break into!

I'd wager a fair chunk of change that I could MAKE new ejection seats and make a FAT profit on them if I sold them for 100K each!

That price for a seat overhaul is just nutty. Someone's gettting ripped off, and it's the taxpayers.

And yes, I've had opportunities to inspect the ACES II ejection seats in some detail. They're complex and certainly require experienced techs to take care of them, but they're not THAT complex, not by a long shot.

The car in your driveway is more complex than an ejection seat, and what does the average car sell for these days?

CJ

cmjohnson, The cost for seats is in the expendables. A full set of CADs/PADs/ROCKAT for a seat is over $100,000 easy. The metal is relatively cheap. A friend works for a company manufacturing replica ejection seats for use in sims. These are obviously not flight worthy, but are very good looking units. His cost to manufacture one of them is probably more than you paid for your car. The precision and parts count is insane, even for a simulated seat. Put in the QA and paperwork to make the seat flight worthy and you are talking well over $100k per in single units for the metal/software, no CADs/PADs/Rockets.

Kevin
The Ejection Site

Something I thought of when reading this....

you guys say the canopy and seat will have to be replaced, but aren't the flight instruments, displays, .... damaged by the blast of the rockets while ejecting?

viper31, depending on the seat the rocket doesn't ignite until it is near the top of the catapult stroke. On the NACES seat used here, the rocket is ignited at or above the cockpit rail height. The blast does fill the cockpit to a degree, but it is a very short burst and does minimal damage to anything except stuff in the direct path of the rocket efflux. This on the NACES is a near vertical path (spreading slightly wide) from the back edge of the bucket on either side. The blast would impinge on the sides of the consoles and the circuit breaker panels in the F-14D cockpit. Damage would probably be relatively minimal. A good cleaning would probably suffice.

In the F-16 the ACES II uses the CKU-5 series of rocket catapults (ROCATS). The CKU uses an internal piston rod for the catapult which is about 30 inches long or so. (Mark may be able to get us the exact length.) The Rocket portion is ignited by gas from the catapult section venting into the rocket grain as the catapult piston reaches the end of its travel. The rapidly expanding gasses from the rocket expels the two disks covering the nozzles and the rocket blast exits the seat at an angle from the verticle that is designed to travel thru the center of gravity of the seat/man package (see the diagrams on <a href="http://www.ejectionsite.com/a10aces.htm">this page</a> for what I am talking about. This blast occurs before the seat clears the rails but it is vectored aft against the seat track assembly. The rocket blast may damage that, or it may merely scorch it. I have photos of sleds after seat ejections that show both scenerios. In one the seat track assembly suffered a failure of a piece of sheet metal, but no more damage. In some of the YF-22 photos I have the sheet metal is dented and deformed, but no significant damage.

The cockpit would likely have lots of soot and sandblast-like effects that may require repairs, but in most cases this would be mild.

There was a case where an H7AF blasted out of the front cockpit of an F-4E under maintainance, killing the crew chief who was seated on it at the time. The cause was an electrical short caused by a circuit breaker panel being slid under the seat while the battery was changed. The short caused the underseat rocket (akin to the NACES rocket mentioned before) to fire inside the cockpit. It blasted the cockpit floor, forced the seat up the rails and out of the cockpit. As it did so the blast impinged on the aft instrument panel and did significant damage to it. The cost of repair was over $500,000. The jet was eventually retired (only a year or so after repairs were completed) and sent to the boneyard for conversion to a QF-4 drone to be shot down.

Kevin
The Ejection Site

Forum: Military Aircraft of the Cold War

F-14 cabriolet in the sky