If you ever have to punch out of a fighter jet, you will quickly want to assess your situation, which will determine the next step. The instructor at Langley simply said, "If you see the ground coming up big and fast, pull the rip cord." If the chute deploys above 14,000 feet and you are having trouble breathing, there is a "green apple" knob on the right side of your harness that you can pull to buy yourself about eight minutes of oxygen supplied to your mask from a reserve in your parachute rig.
#Galaxy fighters checklist free#
Generally speaking, a pilot would know the altitude at which they punched out, but it can be difficult to tell how high you are once you are free falling. If you fall below 14,000 feet and your chute fails to deploy, you can pull a rip cord manually to release the canopy. Not to mention that canopy openings at high altitude are much more violent due to the thinner air, increasing the risk of injury upon chute deployment.) (Any higher and you could freeze, or go hypoxic from lack of oxygen, or both. This activates your parachute, which will deploy automatically as long as you are 14,000 feet or lower. A small metal key attaches to the main belt of your harness, and when you eject, it pulls and activates a small red knob on the left side of your harness, called the "red apple" by airmen. The system is designed to be mostly automated, but there is no guarantee that everything will function like it's supposed to. The chute automatically deploys if you are at low enough altitude, and if all goes well, you should float to the ground at a speed that won't kill you.īut your work is not done just because you yanked those levers and left the jet. After you fly out, the seat itself falls away. The co-pilot sitting in the rear seat needs to go first-otherwise the rockets from the pilot's seat will burn the person sitting behind. But in the older T-38, each person needs to take care of himself or herself. In newer two-seat jets, the ejection seats are synchronized so activating one triggers the other. Within seconds you should be floating over the falling aircraft with a parachute canopy fluttering over your head. When you pull one or both of the two levers positioned on the sides of the seat, charges fire to blow the aircraft canopy and then rocket boosters under your ass take the whole seat, with you in it, up and out of the jet. Jay BennettĮach pilot, co-pilot, or weapons systems officer wears a large parachute and harness that buckles into the seat of their aircraft. airman goes through ejection training, including a VR-style simulation where you pretend to parachute to the ground, running through the post-ejection checklist as you go. If the pilot needs to warn you that you're going to have to eject in the near future, he will use the word "eject," as in, "Hey, get ready, we are going to have to eject in about 30 seconds." If things go horribly wrong and you need to blow out of the ship immediately, the command is, "bailout! bailout! bailout!"Ī U.S. A Fire Under Your Assįirst, you learn what to listen for. I got to hop in the back of a T-38 trainer for one of the exercise flights-but not before five hours of egress and ejection training just in case anything went wrong. F-22s, F-35s, French Dassault Rafales, and British Eurofighter Typhoons took to the skies together for the very first time, pitting the new jets in mock engagements against red air adversaries in F-15s and T-38s. I recently went down to Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, during the 2017 Atlantic Trident exercise, an international training exercise in which American, British, and French air forces fly all three nations' top jets together. And you better tuck in your knees and elbows, because if anything hits the side of the cockpit on the way out, it's coming off. Once those rockets fire under the seat, they blow a person up and out of the cockpit with enough force to seriously bruise both shoulders on the harness straps and possibly break collarbones.
The turbulent process of ejecting puts pilots at serious risk of injury. The last thing a fighter pilot wants to do is eject, and it's not just because they're abandoning the ship to a fiery demise.
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