The REAL Truth About Ejection

all right joining us again in early subscribers to the channel who will recognize John because it's been what John like two years yeah it's two years since you and I have our chat about uh the Gulf War and what happened to the tornadoes and everything else then yeah so we had you on for a an episode that I call tornado down um RFA theater on his hellish days is a pow during Desert Storm um so if folks that are just seeing this have not seen that episode um recommend highly uh that you check it out and now John has written a book called eject eject and what's important in the title is that subtitle which is escape from the aircraft is just the beginning so basically John talks about every other objection besides his own and so half of the book is sort of the development and the mechanics of the ejection seat and the other half and this is a facile ratio I apologize John but uh our let's just call him C stories folks that have ejected and the effect the resonant effect it had both on them and their families so John let's start by talking about the early history of the ejection seat most people think of Martin Baker which is the seat that you and I sat on for so many years as the kind of the the the Pioneers but they weren't the only makers of the ejection seat so the first uh recorded real story of ejection I think is 1943 with a German uh in a measure Smith uh that had gone out of control and he had a compressed air uh Escape system so the secret it was basically um uh almost a powerful spring and indeed some of the first seats were Jack in the Box Springs they simply got you up out of the lip of the aircraft that you were in so that you could fall out rather than trying to clamber out into the airflow and the compressed air one blasted the first guy out uh using compressed air and we had obviously then still uh released his parachute in the the Martin Baker aspect started with Sir James mon or he wasn't Sir James then James Martin and his uh flying partner Valentine Baker and they'd set up their Aircraft company again before the um the second world war and they started developing aircraft during the second World War uh James was the engineer came over from Ireland um and Valentin Baker was uh the the pilot who'd won awards um from World War One and James uh invented an aircraft or invented a number of aircraft but uh his mate his best pal was killed in an aircraft in front of James crashed uh on takeoff an experimental aircraft at test aircraft uh and vanity Baker burned to death and the account of it is actually quite brutal in actual fact James never really recorded his thoughts but it is generally supposed that seeing his best mate burned to death just changed James from an aircraft designer to an escape system designer during World War II and that's what he basically started out as and it ended up uh in the um in the aftermath of the second world war with the first ejection seats he was testing them they were the first ones were basically a metal seat with an explosive charge on it so you're basically sitting on a bomb which you activated uh and he tested he was testing these using sandbags and at some point he decided he needed to test them on human beings so a fitter from his aircraft uh said okay boss I'll do this for you and I've sent you a picture and you've seen it in the book uh of the guys kind of uh that you know he's in his Sunday Best suit as though he's going out for dinner after church with his family or something and he tested them on the ground first and then he went off and tested them airborne and that's how the mark one Martin Baker seat came about so the first guy to eject is this guy Joe Lancaster so let's talk about the circumstance that led to him on you Joe uh he's the second world war pilot he won the distinguished flying cross we knew each other quite well we actually you can see we shared many drinks together over the years sadly Joe passed away three years ago now after the war he became a test pilot and he ejected from his experimental aw52 if you look at it it looks nothing like a B2 spirit and this is back in 1949 amazing looking aircraft there's no computerized aided design there's no simulators if somebody built an aircraft at an experimental aircraft the way you've tested it was to get in and fly the dawn thing and that's what he was doing and it went out of control and he's sitting on a mark one seat so it goes out of control and he has to decide right as you well know ejection is your last chance of survival it's dangerous but if you do not eject you're gonna die and so Joe uh ejected but he's not very far from his home he can see his hometown of Coventry where his wife and son live this so the aircraft basically goes out of control it's poor poisoning it's throwing him around everywhere so the first thing he has to do is pull the handle to uh flip the canopy off so the aircraft canopy is blown away the next thing he has to do is then it's a red handle in the very first seat had just a a head box handle and he pulls the handle down pulls the handle out face face mask comes down and it and he pulls that and the ejection seat fires and that is more or less the end of the ejection seats roll back then it's got an explosive charge on it and it blasts him like a champagne Court which is what he describes it as out of the aircraft and so Joe is now at I think 5 000 feet tumbling on this seat a small stabilizing parachute comes out of the seat to help stabilize the seat but the seat has finished its job it's exploded and he's out the aircraft Joe then has to reach out tumbling like a honor a sick of all Leaf uh has to find his seat release harness Joe's going to be really careful because he doesn't want to mix it up with his parachute release harness so he has to click twist click and then unstrapped physically unstrapped from the seat and it's I think it's got six straps on it unstrapped from the seat while he's tumbling through the air push the seat away and then he goes to the Free Fall reaches back around to find his parachute Dera release d-ring pulls his parachute ring his parachute opens and he's floating down Joe's the first man to eject in for in anger on A Martin Baker's seat and the process took him just over 30 seconds that's a long time as you can imagine no no I cannot imagine and when I was reading this as you described to sort of with your hands as you're hurtling through you know 20 000 feet or so try to figure out to release the seat and not the parachute that just gave me the willies yeah reading that obviously um this is a sub-optimum Escape system uh as you've just described the machinations you've got to go through so as development went on we went from different things to get you out of the airplane from a spring to you know minor explosions look my favorite one uh and I only deal with it very briefly in the book was what was basically called the the hook system which was like a a fishing rod and so basically there was a massive massive hole down the the spine of the aircraft and it's anchored uh at the at the tail like this and it's got a huge spring under it and there's a hook which comes off it and goes down onto the pileless harness and if he has to eject he has to get rid of the canopy and then basically release the spring so it's like um like a fishing rod it goes or a Roman catapult go it flicks up and it basically hooks the guy out of the cockpit and flings him across the back of the tail I mean can you imagine that so speaking of that the book outlines a few let's just call them wacky ideas you know you know in the development phase all of these which seem eccentric and Byzantine now seemed reasonable at the time but you have the Yankee extraction system there's the Bell aerosystems regalo Wing which was kind of uh you know it looked like something that Leonardo da Vinci would have designed um the Fairchild Stratos Corporation Escape system which is sort of a James bond-esque kind of a looking thing and then the command Aerospace Corporation gyrocopter these were all in play these were ideas that were happening the Fairchild Stratus Corporation system the seat basically came out of the aircraft and as it came out instead of the seat stabilizing parachute stabilizing the seat it began to pull out what is in effect a mini microlite aircraft so it pulled out a tail boom and then Springs came out and extended wings out of the side of the seat there's a little motor under it basically the pilot is then sitting in what is in effect a micro light or in the the Cayman the Carmen one in actual fact literally a James Bond flying seat so like everything in r d and in technology particularly military technology The Innovation was a function of lives lost by and large right and so or in in some cases permanent damage to neck and spine uh so we got a little more elegant with how you got out of the airplane over the years because people sustained grave injury by ejecting yes their lives were you know saved but at pretty great physical cost so what were some of the high points uh that got us to the the modern ejection seat along the way James Martin had gone from The Mark II which was still a manual seat by the time it got to the Mark III they were automatic instead of not seat just being a metal seat it was then it wasn't a computer because it was the 1950s it was Clockwork it then sensed that you're safe from the aircraft gmet has measured what you were doing and then it cuts you free from the seat and the seat was dragged away and the parachute was automatically open so we went from manual to automatic and then the next big development was the rocket seat and so we went in the 1960s James was looking at I was 50s and then into the 60s was looking at instead of an explosion you rocket packs you still have the initial small explosion which starts to raise the seat up but as the seat Rises up there's a another cable which is attached to the floor of the aircraft and it triggers the rocket pack which is under the seat and so you put the the promo um of the of the book you put that up at the beginning there Ward um and you can clearly see so that's a mark 10 seat in a Harrier that is Martin pert ejecting on the runway in Afghanistan as you can see he's carrying live weapons which is why he wants out of that aircraft if you watch the video the Flames just about a third of a second before that the aircraft is engulfed in flames and his cockpit is engulfed in flames but you can clearly see there the ejection and you can still see if you look beneath the ejections you can see bits of his canopy and everything flying away but the rocket pack is fired and that is now instead of a kind of a 22 G kick of your backside all in one go you get a kind of a high G kick as the explosion goes off and then the rocket pack fires and you're on that James Bond seat for about a second as it blasts you 300 feet 250 feet into the air so the mark one you had to be at kind of you had to have enough time to eject unstrap push the seat away for free so you had to be a kind of 5 000 feet the mark three mark four by five you could actually be on the runway at 60 knots and eject it would probably you'd probably break your legs but you that it gave you enough time and there was enough airflow to pull the parachute out but so Runway 60 knots on the ground and by the time you get to the Rockets seat the Mark 10 that I sat on that's a zero zero seat so you could be stationary on the ground and eject and you'll be I'm going to use the word fine but you haven't it will take you high enough to allow you to be released automatically from the seat uh and to float down and so I described Joe's seat which took 30 seconds I was on a mark 10. completely fully automatic rocket seat so when I ejected hit by a missile system you pull the handle and then the next thing you know you're under the parachute but the process that receipt the development of the seat is astonishing because what happens now is you pull the handle the tornado was a cockpit was uh blasted free on a rocket little rockets that simply threw it up and then they uh it was blown clear behind you then the uh the the initial ejection charge fired so the seat began to rise up and as you'd rise up you've got arm restraint and leg restraints now to hold you steady so that you could eject at 600 knots and people have done that and you still could be injured but you know there's a chance of being said your arms are dragged in as you as you come up the rails your legs are Dragged In and held in the back of the seat and as you rise up the rails I think by about kind of a foot uh then the rocket pack fires and then the the rocket pack takes you out the aircraft you Accelerate from I think it's around zero to 200 miles an hour upwards under around 15 times the force of gravity in about half a second and as you come out of the aircraft the seat is now sensing what you are doing and where you are the seat is stabilized by its own little stabilization parachute it senses if you're stable and but at least 10 000 feet it will cut you away immediately and so basically it starts to all the little things go click click click you're not aware of any of this it cuts you free from the seat releases you from the seat the seat has got a stiff parachute which actually pulls the seat away from you as it cuts you free so it is just pulled away from you and as it pulls away its Last Action is to release your parachute and so you then float down Joe was on a mark one seat 30 seconds I was on a mark 10 seat fully automatic just over two seconds and it is so quick so instantaneous all I remember is a really hard pull of the handle and I mean really hard you don't want to kind of you don't want to be trying to do this a second time I can remember almost a Fizz and a kind of looking down and seeing Flames coming out my backside and then the next thing is parachute opens and you're under a parachute and you're now a normal parachute or though in my case I was a normal parachute parachuting down Behind Enemy Lines and then you get through now to the mark 18 seat which is in the F-35 and that now is a fully computerized seat and you're talking about it also has autonomy where sometimes it decides you know when to eject it has autonomy only in the circumstances of when you're in the hover if one of the fans fails the pilot will not have enough uh time to eject before they hit the ground because the downward vector and this was part of the big uh development of the rocket seat with a Harrier because you could have a downward Vector countering your upward vector and that was a huge the huge problem which people have been really badly injured uh by that so the downward Vector on the F-35 would mean that you didn't have time to eject and so the seat if the fan fails the seat will eject the pilot with no further reference the other thing that comes to mind John when you're talking about the automatic ejection system and the circumstances the flight regime where it might happen in the F-35 is that mishap where the factory pilot ejected or was ejected on the runway at uh Fort Worth a couple of months ago and I have not seen the the closed out mishap report so I don't know what the final answer is but some were surmising that the guy did not pull the handle but that the logic had ejected him because he met the uh the various I'm surprised he or she we know who it is did different actual facts well that's the thing because when you look at the sequence it's like okay now he's under control and then it then he ejects right or he is ejected after he's coming to rest in the runway or in the infield like you said when he was he was rolling out of control it's like that's when I would have pulled the handle so again the point you're making here is uh the the technology has come really really a long way since the early days the point that I've made endlessly is these things sit in that aircraft for years so you think of your Tomcat on a carrier getting rained on getting sea salt on it people clambering in and out month after month after month on deployment and they sit there and they do nothing and they wait and they just sit and they're such amazing pieces of technology that 10 15 20 30 years after they were built five years after they might have been put in a in an aircraft some unlucky Aviator goes oh my God and pulls the handle and they work and oh by the way shout out to the Ames which was the rate in the Navy that worked on the seats during the you know periodic maintenance that they would pull the seats and make sure that the Rocket Motors were have hadn't timed out so we call them armorous they're our armorous and so uh we they are they're the ones that look after us and so my armrest presented they always present you with a handle after you reject clearly mine didn't come back with me because it's still in the desert some way but the the the the the agreement is that you take them a case of beer uh which is actually small recompense for saving your life isn't it so play severe and you get they presented me with this you know with uh you know handle mounted and everything else and everybody who ejects or did at that time the armorers would give that as a thank you for the case of beer that we gave them for saving our lives but they're absolutely without them my god well that's one of the coolest things on and I love me while as I said last episode that that you can have obviously uh to earn it you've got to do something fairly harrowing to put up hardly the other thing you get for ejecting is your Martin Baker ejectee number what everybody who's ejected has a number what's your number well there's two two different things so there's a Martin Baker Club because you get a little tie I should have put my tie you get a little tight you get a tie with a the red triangle on it uh I do a little certificate the little pin that you can wear a tie pin and everything else so the club is basically when you join the club so I am 4417 but in actual fact it that doesn't matter because back in the 40s and the 50s people just never bothered and so there are thousands of people who never bothered and interestingly sometimes now people will pop up from the from the 1950s I ejected in 1953 and they will have a higher number than me what I have got from The Martin Baker records uh is when my number in the sequence so Joe Lancaster is number one in the sequence of ejections that are recorded I am 6089. wow okay absolutely 2 000 guys who didn't join the club oh yeah EO easily and if you look now I think it's up to 7600 seven so if you're 4417 is John Peters your pilot 4 418 because he came out I think I'm before him because in command eject MCO I think that you call it uh if whoever Commander Jets the rear Sita the wizo the nav goes first I think about a hundredth of a second before so your number is uh is the first one and then the pilot I think that's how it happens so that's a a fantastic segue into the MCO discussion I use the the acronym MCO which is Mission Commander's option in the F-14 so the handle if the handle was forward in the back seat and the Rio had control of where this handle went it was on the left console so forward was it said pilot and what that meant is if the person in the back seat pulls the handle canopy will come off it's a single piece canopy unlike the tornado um so single piece canopy so canopy would come off and the Rio would go or whoever was sitting in the back seat would go only in the pilot would stay in if it was in the rear position Mission Commander option MCO then canopy would come off backseater would go half a second later front seater would go okay so I'll just remind folks who may have seen this episode there was a circumstance out at Fallon Nevada where the Air Wing was out there this was vf213 flying an f-14d and you can see the pilot has no upper handle because that's a mark 14 ejection seat Martin beggar Mark 14 but they had this this one's ship driver who was a captain he was actually the air Warfare commander in the battle group and he had been begging for a family and he had his seed quality done swim Fizz and so they're like okay okay it'd probably be smart for the air Warfare Commander to experience flight in the F-14 and so during the demo the pilot who was a lieutenant um was like I'm going to show you uh some some zero g right and so the the captain had not the the ship driver Captain had not strapped himself in very well and so he reached for the handle to pull himself back into the seat and boom pulled the handle fortunately the handle was forward the the MCO pilot handle was forward so only he went now like we're saying sort of a theme here uh you know sort of the refrain here is this technology was a function of people losing their lives so you have a story in the book of an F4 yeah before this technology existed the story in the book is about an F4 which did not have command eject uh and so basically the guy the the pilot had some sort of seizure uh and he's gone the button enough the rail is trying to get him to to keep control the aircraft uh in there he knew that he wasn't and he was with him he was in formation with another F4 and the guys were saying get out get out get out you've got to reject and you wouldn't do it because he didn't want to leave his Pilot and he left it until the very last minute uh and ejected pilate remained in and was killed obviously uh impacting the sea command eject came in on the tornado uh interestingly uh in the first years of the tornado some of the pilots because a lot of the pilots who went onto the two-seater tornado had been single seat Jaguar Harrier pilots and they were not happy with giving a navigator control I think there is two or three occasions in the early 1980s where and something did go wrong with the aircraft and the Navigator rejected but the pilot stayed in and was killed and so we then we went from people being killed in uh two-seat aircraft because there's no Commander jet people are being killed in Combined eject aircraft because they didn't want to trust the guy in the back or the woman in the back as it would be now uh with a command eject by the time I got to the front line in the late 1980s every single person every single pilot wanted to fly with Commander jet uh enabled because they said listen I don't care um you know I want the best chance to get down to my wife and kids it was all men however the other story in the book around that is when when things go wrong when when things go tits up and there's a story in there where the commander check system uh the the guys are flying in Germany and A10 comes in to do a mock attack which is what happened all the time in Germany we would have a thousand aircraft in the sky in an afternoon A10 comes in uh and the guy in the front doesn't see him until the last second and it basically looks like a head-on collision and he basically hauls back on the stick lights the afterburners and pulls and rolls as hard as he can the tornado was your original electric jet instead of cables it was all it was digital you know fly by wire there'd been a couple of occasions when uh the tornado had been flying by a very powerful radio mast and it had gone out of control because of the the strength of the radio signals had it was thought had sent the tornado out of control the guy in the back is heading looking at the display he thinks that the jet has gone out of control because he knows it's a mast he simply reaches down and pulls the handle because he thinks the Jets Out of Control bigger was in the front is completely in control and he's just avoided a mid-air Collision the next thing he knows is he's under his parachute and all of his papers and his maps are floating down he thinks he's had a mid-air Collision but he's been command ejected from a perfectly serviceable aircraft well like you said sometimes things go wrong I I think as you also said by the time we got several decades into command eject Fleet Pilots were like hey you're a professional backseater I trust you in fact on my one of my recent episodes Tom page was talking about flying into the barricade on the USS Ranger because they ran him out of gas and he does expressly say the Rio you've got the call on ejecting I'm just going to fly the airplane so if we flame out I'm gonna keep trying to either relight the motors or whatever but you've got the ejection sequence that's you own that thing I've I've also shown a plate tape a carrier of videotape several times in a couple of different episodes of an F14 behind cat 3 that gets blown over the side and you can see here the the airplane noses over the side and gets hung up in the catwalk and the Rio ejects them now I heard anecdotally after the fact that the pilot was not happy that the Rio chose to eject he said I knew we were going to stop you just you know strike damage to it privately good Tomcat let's segue into a couple of these individual stories the first one that comes to mind is Bill Schaffner and he was doing an exchange tour and wound up having a mishap in the lightning talk to us about his circumstance combat Vietnam combat pilot a really experienced guy in the late 1960s uh he'd done his I think he did a tour of two tours in Vietnam uh and got the lightning exchange so the English electric lightning you know I mean an amazing aircraft it could be put into Bernard if you would last about probably three minutes or something like that but he was on Exchange tour with the lightning inexperienced in operating the lightning and he was doing a night intercept over the a horrible night over the North Sea and basically uh got too slow what they think happened is impacted the water and so he went missing and the story then went on for another 25 or 30 years because as is tradition as you're The Nutters got involved in the so that was 1969 I think they found the aircraft I think it was about seven or eight months later I can't remember the exact dates but they found the aircraft kind of about a couple of hundred feet down in the North Sea there was no bill Schaffner in the cockpit but the cockpit canopy was closed the seat handle had been pulled but the seat had not fired it was still in the aircraft Shafter was not in the aircraft and the you could see you could see on the picture that his PSP his personal survival pack uh so you're attached to that the the strap for that has been unfastened and it's hanging over the side of the aircraft trapped under the closed canopy where did Bill Schaffner gone the UFO extremists said he'd been captured by UFOs aliens and he you know he'd been take you know then this went this went on for years and I mean years but what had actually happened was hit the sea probably badly injured hit the sea in a lightning at maybe 140 150 mile an hour he had tried to eject so he pulled the handle the seat hadn't fired now not because of a problem with a seat but an enlightening the canopy has to go first there's no canopy Breakers or anything on the lightning ejection seat when the canopy had been serviced the firing unit had been tightened too much and a screw stopped the canopy from firing a simple Titan screw and they found that in actual fact a number of the lightning canopies were like this so if anybody rejected or tried to reject they would have been killed because it wasn't coming off see fire because the canopy didn't come off the theory then is that bill badly injured stinking night in the North Sea rain freezing cold probably opened the canopy unstrapped himself he unstrapped his personal survival pack which had his dinghy in it because it would be quite difficult to get that out of the seat to jump over the side he probably jumped over the side badly injured maybe couldn't inflate his life jacket but certainly perished in the North Sea and he was never found his body his body was never found why was the canopy shut that's what the UFO's enthusiasts got on as the lightning then sank because it would have sank pretty quickly the water pressure would have been increasing on the cockpit canopy and the hydraulic pressure over time would have melded away and so the canopy simply as they cut is the hydraulic pressure went away the canopy shut and that's how the the lighting was found but like you said that family didn't discover that for decades oh they didn't discover that first because this happened pretty early in his tour yeah well he was he was still yeah he wasn't quite he hadn't been declared fully combat ready so he'd only had maybe 16 or 17 hours on the line so here's this American Family living in England and sort of loved they were loving it you know they were really getting into it and and then suddenly uh dad appears to have been killed in a mishap although there's no closure they moved back to what Wisconsin or something and and she gets married to a school teacher right and the boys are raised by that guy and then a long time later is it the Sun that that comes into this information after the initial kind of letters saying we're still looking into it the lia the American liaison officer was posted back to America and everybody forgot about it so when the accident report and back then in 1970 accident reports were considered secret so they weren't kind of handed around accident summaries were but accident reports were not nobody told the family what had happened so the last they heard I think was about two months after the accident saying we found the aircraft bill is not in it he is missing and absolutely certainly Dead uh and that's the last they heard of it the the liaisonoff said I'll come back to you you know once we know a bit more nobody ever did nice so that's a 1969 1970 now I think it was so for 30 years Bill Schaffner was never really mentioned it was a different time back then uh uh his sons knew about him and they kind of had a few bits of his own equipment and they had a box with his some of his old uh flying kit in it but they never really spoke about it they just knew that their father was missing not presumed dead missing dead in I think it was 2 000 so the early days of the internet uh one of his sons is kind of sitting in his office in I think he's in Chicago by now in a law firm and he's doing I don't know was it called Googling in 2023 trying to find out what his dad or something back there uh and he kind of Googles Bill Schaffner lightning and the first stuff that comes up is reports saying taken by a UFO and there's all this stuff that a transcript of a conversation with Bill Shatner saying I can see a bright light in the sky oh my God it's coming for me oh my God it's and that's the first his son who was I think one at the time so his son's now kind of 30 or something like that the first that he knows his father's been captured by aliens so if some saw this aliens but he then spoke to some of his fathers his late father's friends aviators and said this is absolute nonsense a that transcript is made up we don't speak like that that none of that happened but it spurred him on and he eventually came to the UK forced the ministry of Defense who were still even back then in 2000 reticent for some unknown reason about releasing details but he got the accident report which showed what had happened in terms of the ejection seat piece the lesson there is ejection seat maintenance right is why the seat didn't fire but again as we said at the outset this book is about the stories beyond the actual objection and that one is is compelling and full of sorrow and it's decades in the making the the next one I want to review real quick is uh because I thought this had only happened in the United States in fact I did an episode about this which was a vf74 F-14 pilot in an exercise scenario shot down uh U.S Air Force F4 and that's the smoke Dorsey episode again if you haven't seen that episode check it out but a similar thing in fact this was a national Scandal right I mean this is like um you know all of the The Sensational papers in in the UK were all over this thing so this is an RAF Phantom shot down a Jaguar so talk to us about how that happened and what was what were the the after effects of that having him this was in the middle of the Falklands War in actual fact so the Falklands is going on in 1982 whatever it was 8 000 miles in the South Atlantic the fighting there people are ejecting people are dying ships are going down and in Germany we've still got aircraft on quick reaction alert um uh you know the Soviet threat is still very real uh aircraft are routinely armed exercises go on and so at wildenrath which is in Northern Germany uh the an exercise it goes off and all of the the first thing that happens is all the Phantoms are armed to uh show that we can do it uh and then um they're d-armed and then some of them are launched on exercise scenarios they send one Airborne armed this has happened and it does happen but there's a number of things the interlocks have to be fitted although it was found out afterwards that there are no interlocks you can't go with pins in the in the you can't you can't fly with the pins in so the but you know the circuit breakers are meant to be uh not made that the trigger shouldn't be made alive the electric circuit should be open uh the controller should know that he's controlling an armed aircraft and make calls that say uh check arm check switches saved but as you know in an F4 to get the camera to roll if you're doing a practice intercept you need you you make the switches live some of the switches learn and you go through the sequences though you're doing it for real so Phantom gets Airborne at the same time a Jaguar has been on doing just a a trip up to right up to the North Eastern Germany up near uh Hanover I think and Steve Griggs is heading his way back to Brogan which is only probably 10 miles from bilnruth he's heading his way back and I don't know if you ever flew in Germany was a pain in the backside there were so many uh units around trying to weave your way around and he's he's weaving his way what's called the clutch it was called to to get back to brugin and he's probably about three or four minutes from landing and he's flying with uh Paddy Murphy in another aircraft who's his wingman so they're kind of flying through this we've their way thinking about having a cup of tea in a sandwich with their lunch they're close to landing and Steve says he could see that on his rwr and his warning receiver you can see there was an F4 tracking him this happened all the time in Germany absolutely normal but sometimes you would react and go into a practice kind of uh counter but not when you're on the final kind of three or four minutes uh to Landing you're so he just let him do it he said that I watched I saw it on my right I couldn't see him I watched him track all the way around and then come into my six o'clock and so Paddy is in the other aircraft watching this and so uh the guys in the Phantom went through all the sequences forgot that they had live signed by him Sidewinder missiles on they forgot happens and they went through and he went uh uh uh Fox 2 Fox 2 the jaguar and to his horror a Sidewinder came off the wing of the aircraft oh Shadow you've seen The Sidewinder going off it is one hell of a blast and it simply went straight in up to the uh through the the Jaguar now the Saving Grace here was it was the old Sidewinder I think the golf so it was it wasn't a black blast fragmentation it was expanding rod and so for your for the the viewers an expanding the newer ones are blast fragmentation so they're a bomb a grenade with little titanium uh rods that simply tear through an aircraft and a person blasting it apart the expanding Rod was a a welded Rod crammed around the Warhead and basically what happened was when it went off it expanded into a circle of like a circular saw that you'd use in a a workshop and grigsy was lucky the first thing that he knew was that that Paddy Murphy was shouting eject ejected at him and he didn't quite know what happened he said my aircraft wasn't working I was kind of stirring the controls and it wasn't working because his cockpit had been cut away from the aircraft so the jet was had gone behind him that he was flying a cockpit not attached like you know in a cartoon when all the cables are coming out the back so it's not attached to anything and he said he was looking it just tilted down like they said what the hell Paddy watch this happen he said all I could see was a flash and the back of Steve's aircraft went away and his cockpit tilted and started rotating and so Steve said the cockpit rotated and as it rotated as he came up right again Paddy was shouting ejected yet and he got and he screamed it and Steve said well Paddy must know what he's talking about so he just pulled the handle and he was lucky that it was an expanding Rod because the seat wasn't damaged and he wasn't damaged and he ejected from the aircraft and he was lucky that it was an expanding Rod because the seat wasn't damaged and he wasn't damaged and he ejected it from the aircraft helicopter comes up picks him up and takes him off the bay well takes him first back to base to the medical center on base where all these mates are waiting with beer he's then driven to the hospital six sheets to the wind for his x-rays um that would never happen now and at the end of that he's driven back to his base and the Phantom crew that shot him down had been invited for a bear to the base and so he was having a beer with the blokes who what five hours earlier had shot him down it was a sequence a catastrophic sequence of mistakes so put simply they'd forgotten that they were armed this does happen you know these you know how many people have accidents with loaded guns you know this this it's it's difficult to imagine but it does happen so that was the first thing they'd forgotten they made the switches when they shouldn't one of the biggest things that had happened was you had circuit breakers in the in the Phantom that you will remember the the guy in the back pulled the circuit breaker but he was carrying in his pocket on his G suit in his lower pocket down my's calves he was carrying Airfield information a big book and his pistol because it was an exercise and then we didn't he wasn't using a holster so he had that in the pocket and what had happened was his bulky lower G suit pocket had closed the circuit breaker again all of this sequence of events came back in the long did you we had the thing in there called in the Air Force called Break the Chain if you could break the chain of events you can prevent an accident that chain was long and nobody broke the chain and it ended up with losing an aircraft and Steve Griggs very nearly being killed and he was very very lucky and the two guys were caught marshaled and found guilty of gross negligence it was a bit unfair because it wasn't it was their fault they forgot they were armed but there was a lot of organizational corporate Air Force things that had gone on that meant it was an accident waiting to happen well there were a lot of similarities to the vf-74 mishap that I was talking about but there's some substantial differences too which is the F-14 pilot fired with intent he in fact he station stepped as I described in the episode he went Fox two as Rio wasn't really paying attention he went Fox 2 it was it was the station one Sidewinder and it didn't come off so he he actually stationed step to station eight to have the missile come off so he intended to fire a weapon in this case they didn't intend to fire the missile the only reason he pulled the trigger was so that the HUD camera the gun camera would spool up and record the fact that he had the shot the other thing that in fact the press the British press made quite uh a big deal about this part was there was supposed to be red tape over the master arm switch uh that said basically okay don't turn master arm on and that tape wasn't there and so they're like okay so we lost a multi-million dollar airplane because we were missing a couple sent a couple of you know Pence piece of red tape you've got to be kidding me the last C story and again I I intrigued folks to read the book it's called eject eject by our good friend John Nickel in Kosovo an F-117 was shot down so when I heard this is happened I might hold it didn't we buy these things because they're invisible to radar so how did this F-117 get shot down yes a Dale zelco F-117 pilot left pennant Colonel I think he was experienced pilot uh flown in the first Gulf War I think it was on the second raid over Baghdad and you're right the F-117 everybody said was the aircraft you couldn't see on radar well not strictly true the reality is that in certain circumstances uh you can see uh an F-117 there's you can especially because you've still got to open those great big bloody doors to get to get the bombs out and so he's on uh he's over Serbia and he's got a feeling that things are going to go wrong he said we've we hadn't really learned the lessons from the Gulf War we were becoming a little bit more complacent we were flying the same kind of routing there's a guy in the ground a missile Commander Serbian missile Commander Zoltan Danny I think his name was he had made some adjustments to his Psalm 3 system Sam three mate is a what is that 1950s you know this is a this is kind of a a huge big supersonic Buffs that's fired it's it's old-fashioned but being old-fashioned was kind of good because he could mess around with various frequencies depending on the frequency of the search and the guidance radar there was a chance that you could actually pick up an F-117 with its doors open and lots of other sequence lots of other things determined they know because they've got spies on the ground that the F1 scenes 17s have taken off from Italy they know that they're going to be there and they can take a pretty damn good guess at where they're going to come from they can ready their systems to look in that direction and sure enough Dale as a Singleton is over Belgrade or on the outskirts of Belgrade drops his bomb and as he uh cleans up he sees two Flames coming up through the thin Cloud layer and he says that they've got me I know that they've got me he tries to maneuver the first one misses him the the second one explodes and simply just blasts his aircraft apart he's tumbling it it blows off I think it is right hand wing and if you go to the Belgrade Museum of Aviation his wings in there so his aircraft is basically flipping over and over completely out of control so he is ridden up in the seat pinned up against the cockpit he's looking down on his seat he's trying to reach the handle and he can't get to it it's not it's not a center handle on the f-17 he's got the two side handles it's an Asus seat and he tries to brace himself all you can remember is saying this is going to hurt because he's up against the cockpit he's not on the seat he can't remember pulling the handle but he clearly does because the next thing that he knows he's at I think it's in like 12 or 11 000 feet and he's under the parachute he manages to get a call out to an a-wax on his survival radio uh Brit it's a Brit uh on the airwax and they managed to get a rough position he lands he's not that far from Belgrade you can see Belgrade burning and the b2s are going in now and he can feel the blast from the b2s wash over him when he's in his little ditch a massive Rescue Mission uh is mounted he's in contact with an A10 and they say right the helicopters are coming in uh use your survival Beacon uh the the infrared survival Beacon so he numbers out of his um his ditch into a bush sets it up it doesn't work it's not working so he can't send out the can't send that that signal and in the end they say right sod it go live and he pops a flare the Rescue helicopters can see his flag off he immediately dances it and the next thing he knows is and he can see the Sparkles of light lands he stands up out of his ditch three very big guys approach one of them's got his picture like that and he's gone through all of the challenges and things that you would do uh the guy still is looking like I said uh what does he say yeah your PJs are here to take you home sir many years later the guy who shot him down makes contact and he goes back to Serbia to meet the guy who shot him down uh and they become friends Mr heartwarming story again the book is a Jack to jacked escape from the aircraft is just the beginning the author is our good friend John nickel John a Triumph I highly recommend this book it gets the coveted moods two thumbs UPS um so uh you you've done it and we've talked about some of the stories here but if you're watching this and now you think oh I've already now I know what the book is about so this has got to be on your must read list so John thank you for spending some time with us once again uh look forward to having on the channel again very soon James mentioned absolute pleasure again great great to chat to an aviator about Aviation thanks mate all right that'll do it for this episode if you're not already a subscriber become one so you don't miss anything if you'd like to help support the Channel please consider using the super thanks the heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.com and in the meantime I look forward to talking to you again very soon [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you

Channel: Ward Carroll

Views: 105,477

Keywords: Ward Carroll, F-14 Tomcat, DCS World, Top Gun, Desert Storm, John Nichol, RAF, fighter pilots, ejection, eject, ejection seats, military history, military aviation, MiG-23 crash, Thunder Over Michigan

Id: jbTUoYk64bY

Length: 49min 27sec (2967 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023