Pensioner on joy ride pulls the 'bang handle'

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/09/frenchman_ejected_fighter_jet_retirement_jolly/

This reads like a comedy of errors - luckily no one killed, but I'll bet a few French airmen & ground crew got a bollocking!

Check out the comments for some insight (and quite a bit of humour!)

mal

The shocking parts are use of “elderly” and “pensioner” for a 64 y.o.

Opp's Here's me think bang handle was something else.

That would have hurt more, I reckon...

And in one brief moment the opportunity for other defence contractors to go for a jolly in the machines they worked to keep in the air disappears......

Wow! Just seems unfathomable that it got to the point where the guy was basically left to his own devices!

The keystone cops couldn't have done a better job.

Talking of grabbing the handle reminds me of an incident that happened during my RAF days. Can't for the life of me remember which station I was at but they had Javelin squadrons there and I worked in the electronics center servicing AI17 interception radar. One day, I was on duty crew and was required to see off a visiting Jav. As it was raining, the crew decided to get aboard in the overnight hangar the aircraft was in. All went well until it was time to tow it out onto the flight line. As the plane reached the door, the navigator reached up to close the hood to stay dry.

Unfortunately, he put his hand up and through the seat ejection handle. Luckily, two of us saw what was about to happen and screamed at him to freeze.The Nav went white went he realized what he was about to do. I can't and don't want to imagine the mess we would have had to clean up if he had "closed the canopy"

Talking of grabbing the handle reminds me of an incident that happened during my RAF days. Can't for the life of me remember which station I was at but they had Javelin squadrons there and I worked in the electronics center servicing AI17 interception radar. One day, I was on duty crew and was required to see off a visiting Jav. As it was raining, the crew decided to get aboard in the overnight hangar the aircraft was in. All went well until it was time to tow it out onto the flight line. As the plane reached the door, the navigator reached up to close the hood to stay dry.

Unfortunately, he put his hand up and through the seat ejection handle. Luckily, two of us saw what was about to happen and screamed at him to freeze.The Nav went white went he realized what he was about to do. I can't and don't want to imagine the mess we would have had to clean up if he had "closed the canopy"

[ATTACH type=full" alt="Red & white Jav.jpg]52334[/ATTACH]

I can't speak for RAF, but I know that in the RAAF we were required to either install bolts where the crew module ejection handle pins went or lockwire the pins in whenever the aircraft was put in a hangar.

Quite right. Safety pins are removed once the crew are strapped in. and replaced before they get out.

This is the MB MK.16F Rafale seat.

Well, you could argue that his action of grabbing the handle had the desired effect. Once firmly pulled it's certainly going to firmly plant your arxe back in the seat.

He did well to survive without injury. Those things are hard on your spine and I have heard of people breaking both femurs because they had their legs tucked up close to the seat instead of letting the leg restraints do their job.

This photo is up on a few news sites.

It will interest them to find out why the front seat didn't follow the rear one out.

https://theaviationist.com/2020/04/09/report-released-on-french-rafale-passengers-accidental-ejection-reveals-both-human-and-technical-failures/

The reason for the failure of the pilot’s ejection seat in the escape sequence was reported as, “The explosion [from the initial rear seat ejection] ruptured the casing of the sequence selector supposed to trigger the pilot ejection seat.”

Usually after a successful egress the crew owe the armourers a carton. I don't know how this will pan out as the failure actually worked in his favour.

Martin Baker will be looking into that one; they don't like their reputation being damaged. Faulty part perhaps. Technically, they should ground all aircraft using those seats until the fault is fixed. First thing would be to figure out if there's a batch fault or just an individual situation.

There's always the possibility the sequence selector was only needed for a two seat sequenced ejection and the pilot, if need be, could still initiate his own egress after the fact.

Martin Baker will be looking into that one; they don't like their reputation being damaged. Faulty part perhaps. Technically, they should ground all aircraft using those seats until the fault is fixed. First thing would be to figure out if there's a batch fault or just an individual situation.

 

There's always the possibility the sequence selector was only needed for a two seat sequenced ejection and the pilot, if need be, could still initiate his own egress after the fact.

Yes, it's my understanding that all Rafales were grounded because of the seat issue. I think it may have been in the linked article or in the comments for the same article.

My seat experience predates the MK.16 by a few decades, so I'm not overly familiar with it. But looking at the photos, it appears to have what I'm assuming might be the auxiliary pull handle on the starboard side of the seat pan (yellow & black painted). Going into negative G with a loose harness, he would be more likely to grab the sides of the seat pan rather than the main handle between his legs. So I'm thinking that's what he's done when he fired it.

There will be a lot of people in trouble over this one. It beggars belief that they put a newbie in the back seat without ensuring he was strapped up properly. And taking off with the helmet undone. Worst case scenario would have been if he only had the chin strap loosely done up which could have broken his neck. Makes one wonder if that pilot's fighter career is over. He might end up flying transports after this one. He would still have to shoulder responsibility for the unpreparedness of his backseater.

Looking at some of the MB test bed photos, that Rafale would have had a lot of burn damage in the rear cockpit. The newer generation of seats fry the cockpit much more than the older types, due to the rockets igniting while the seat is still partially inside the aircraft. The upside down twin gun system wouldn't appear to add to it much, due to most of the flame exiting at the top of the cockpit. But the flame from the rockets would have done a lot of damage.

Photos below are of the F-35 test bed which also has a MK.16 variant, but the basic structure, gun & rocket systems are much the same as that on the Rafale seat.

This photo gives a good view of the twin guns still firing inside the cockpit.

This photo is of a MK.7 in an F-4 Phantom test rig. A fairly standard three stage telescopic gun and rocket pack. You can see the seat and inner tube has exited the gun's intermediate tube with flame expired and totally contained within the gun. In this photo, the inner tube has only just left the intermediate tube and there's only residual black smoke from the secondary charges exiting. It has enough extension to clear the cockpit before the rocket pack ignites, causing much less burn damage. Much harder on the back though, compared with the Rafale/Eurofighter/F-35 seat.

What a wild ride that would be?

I'm a little surprised they don't use a large compressed spring to initiate ejection, then ignite the rockets, once the seat is outside the cockpit.

I'm a little surprised they don't use a large compressed spring to initiate ejection, then ignite the rockets, once the seat is outside the cockpit.

It might be a bit hard on the back, similar to the gun charges. The early Martin Baker had a single stage gun with only the main charge at the top. I think the charge varied depending on the height of the tail fin to clear. Either 50 or 60 fps, and they would get to over 20 G's. In later seats, charges went up to 80 feet per second on some aircraft, but using secondary charges to stagger the blast force rather than one big bang like the early seat. Low tail, twin boom planes like the Vampire didn't need a big charge, whereas high tails like the Mirage would need a much bigger charge, so that's where breaking the force into stages was important.

The idea of the rockets is for zero/zero or low altitude ejection as the rockets take the seat up about 200 feet; enough to get a decent chute canopy. Rockets are also a much softer ride than the explosive charges of the gun. I'd guess the early firing in cockpit of the rockets on the MK.16 seats would be all about saving the pilots back. Historically, the main injuries received were spinal. The RAAF has has 80+ ejections and about 30% of those caused spinal fractures. Most were just hairline cracking from the compressive forces; usually a case of the pilot complaining of ongoing back pain. Only in one case did a broken vertebrae impact the spinal cord and luckily it didn't cause any paralysis.

What a wild ride that would be?

You're not wrong there Flightrite. With all that flame, you would want to make sure the fly on your nomex suit was zipped up tight.

It's interesting in those photos to compare photo #1 ejecting at the rearward sloping seat angle, and #2 how quickly the rocket ignition pushes the pilot forward into an upright position.

I'm a little surprised they don't use a large compressed spring to initiate ejection, then ignite the rockets, once the seat is outside the cockpit.

A spring would be a bad idea. When a spring is released the initial force is high but rapidly reduces. The idea with cartridges is to accelerate uniformly as possible.

The seats in the Mirages were staged, after the sear fired the first cartridge the telescoping tube would start lifting the seat and as it rose other cartridges would be exposed and fire. The rocket motors were fired by a lanyard pulling another sear as the seat reached a certain height.

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I read the investigation report using google translate; it's quite disturbing reading. I really feel sorry for the passenger; it reads like he was bullied into the flight from the word go. Lucky he was not hurt too bad, mainly just powder burns to the face from not having his visor down. He was an employee of an arms company and was in charge of testing at his point of retirement. He had no aviation experience apart from a previous flight on an airliner. The flight was a surprise deal organized by his co-workers through the air base commander. The passenger didn't know about it until he got to the base about four hours before the flight.

It appears the poor bloke was stressed to the max and really didn't want to be there. Recommended procedure for medicals for passengers is one at ten days before the flight, followed up by one on the day. Because the flight was a surprise flight, he only had one on the morning of the flight. On the day the whole thing was pre organized, including lunch with the base commander and the pilots. This put pressure on the medical officer and pilot to pass the whole thing through. It also put a lot of social pressure on the passenger to follow along as he was treated as a VIP guest.

The passenger was in a high state of stress all morning which would have made it hard for him to concentrate on the pre-flight safety briefing. Due to his age and the fact his heart rate was getting near maximum, the doctor decided he should be subjected to no more than 3 G's. A computer failure prevented the doctor from supplying his report to the pilot and passenger, so he rang the pilot and told him to go easy on the bloke. He failed to mention the 3 G restriction. One problem was that the flight was not a dedicated passenger flight. The passenger had been slotted into a three aircraft training exercise, with a combat takeoff and simulated dogfighting. Because of the nature of the mission, the pilot had to stick to the original takeoff procedure, but had decided to skip the dogfight and just do a recon run and return to base.

The passenger's watch recorded his heart rate as between 136 to 142 bpm even before takeoff, indicating a high level of stress. The pilot helped buckle the passenger into the restraint harness and then entered the front cockpit. He missed a small slack loop between keepers in the shoulder region of the harness, a very easy thing to miss. The ground crew member did very little in the way of gear checking, as there was no set checklist for it. They had made up flight suit patches with the passenger's name, company and position, leading the crew chief to assume the passenger had flight experience and knew what he was doing. In reality, the poor bugger was terrified, and didn't have a clue what to do.

Problems with the gear were: slack in the restraint harness, helmet strap not done up, mask fitted asymetrically; one side tight, the other loose.

Also, the G suit lower leg zip not done up on one side, and loose inguinal straps on the combat vest. I'm not familiar with this vest, but it appears to be a general vest with built in life vest and groin straps between the legs. I don't know if it also serves as a pressure jerkin or not.

Before takeoff, the pilot instructed the passenger to lower his visor, but in a state of stress, he didn't lower it. After lift off in a 47 degree climb, G forces reached 3.7. After hearing loud verbalization from the passenger, the pilot backed off and nosed forward, causing negative G of 0.63. The passenger had been pushed down into the seat and now found himself riding up with the small slack in the harness. He had no experience and had not been trained to recognize anything that was happening to him. He grabbed hold of the pull handle between his legs and accidentally ejected at 650'/280kts..

The rear seat ejected as designed. Both canopy cutters worked, as did both seat's harness retractors. The failure of the front seat to eject identified two issues, none related to Martin Baker. An inherent fault in the sequence selector (designed and developed by Dassault) caused a casing rupture at the point where the pyrotechnic line to the front seat attaches. The pyrotechnic signal from the rear seat caused an internal malfunction in the selector. I would guess it caused an increase in pressure and a loose fitted screw caused the front seat's line to blow out. They've recommended fixes for both the selector and tooling and procedures for the screw problem. Another issue raised was the GoPro. It was fitted as authorized on the clear bulkhead between cockpits via a suction cup fitting. When the pyrotechnic cord cutter cut the canopy, the GoPro was dislodged and egressed with seat and passenger, increasing the risk of damage and injury. Having the visors up caused powder burns to the passenger's face.

Issues continued post ejection. Wind blast tore off the unsecured helmet; lucky they were only doing 280kts.. I think it's around the 400 knot mark where eyeball rupture is an issue. At 650', seat separation would have been immediate. When the main parachute deployed, the loose groin straps of the combat vest caught on the pull handle linkage and broke the handle free of the seat. Didn't cause a big problem but has the potential to do so. The dinghy failed due to a packing problem; the activation cord for the CO2 bottle was jammed. Tests on that dinghy revealed another fault as they would deflate after something like 24 hours. The passenger landed in a smooth area off the end of the strip and didn't sustain any real injury in the landing.

The pilot landed the Rafale, shut down the engines, and very carefully exited without safe pinning the seat. As it wasn't safed, they put a barrier around it for 24 hours before working on it. Main cause was put down to passenger stress and lack of experience, knowledge and preparedness. Factors contributing to that are numerous. The base commander would have most to answer for in my opinion. One recommendation by the investigators was for the Air Force to adopt a more stringent checklist for ground crew and pilots, along the lines of their Navy's procedures.

Failed sequence selector.

Onlhy one thing to say.. "Bloody Nora!"