I never planned to...
I would not have thought that a problem -- with air blowing in there at 500 mph, you'd think a lung full of air would do nothing...
I don't know the circumstances behind the story other than the guy got a nice burn
Dumb Question?
- Thread starter paletteone
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The actual air pressure inside the pitot system plumbing isn't all that great, even at 500 mph. The real issue is the suddenness with which it's applied. In flight, ram air pressures change relatively gradually, whereas blowing down the tube causes a sudden burst of pressure which jams the delicate mechanism inside the ASI against the stops, likely bending the bimetallic temperature compensating linkage and decalibrating the instrument, if not actually breaking something.
Same thing goes for static ports, except there it likely damages all three pitot/static instruments as well as the mode C sensor for the radar beacon transponder or IFF.
There've actually been cases of aircraft launching off the waist cats and flying through the jet blast of aircraft parked crosswise on the foredeck doing a high power turn up, and experiencing pitot static damage. (And in the case of F14s, a double flameout and instant splash.) (For budgetary and pork barrel reasons the first F14s were procured with different engines than their intake ducts and engine bays were designed for, and were never happy campers.) That flameout episode in Topgun wasn't entirely Hollywood.
Cheers,
Wes
Oh...
Yikes...
They were supposed to use the F401, which was a F100 with a higher bypass ratio, and an extra compressor stage. The idea was that it could fly as fast or almost as fast as the F-15 while also being able to produce around 10-20% more thrust. Since it wasn't going to be ready on time, it was supposed to be able to make do with the TF30 at first, but the fact is that as you said, politics got in the way, and it remained stuck with the TF30.
Oh yeah, except in real life it wasn't the RIO that got his head caved in, it was actually the pilot.
Are you referencing a specific incident, or was that a general observation?
In the scenario depicted in the film the aircraft is in a flat spin, thus lacking the high speed slipstream to help expedite canopy separation. In a command ejection, the backseater goes out first, and if the canopy is still in the way, he's the one that takes the blow. BTW, those helmets are very tough and VERY heavy so most fatalities are from cervical fractures, not skull damage. Pilots are killed more often by the fact that they're the last one out of the aircraft, and the aircraft may have exited the safe ejection envelope while the ejection sequence was occuring. This is often a result of delaying the decision to eject in an ill-advised attempt to save the aircraft.
Cheers,
Wes
fubar57
General
Interesting Wes. I thought ejection seats had canopy breakers to prevent that sort of thing. Maybe they weren't 100% effective
Take a look at photos online or elsewhere of early F-14s. See any "Martian Antennas" on the RIOs seat headrest?. Those are in general a more modern occurrence, although the A-6 and S-3 were fitted with them from the beginning, as they were designed to eject through the canopy.
I suspect canopy breakers would not have saved Goose, as it appeared not to be an issue of the the canopy jettison failing, so much as the canopy being slow to clear the aircraft due to the lack of a high velocity longitudinal slipstream to snap it backwards after it was released. It's much easier to drive a nail through a board clamped in a vise than one hanging by a string.
Cheers,
Wes
