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Old 02-05-2004, 10:19 AM   #1
Undertoad
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Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
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2/5/2004: Thunderbird pilot ejects



This happened last September but the photo of it was just released the other day. I've taken the large format version and sized it for our consumption.

It was an air show in Idaho. It was the end of the show, the last maneuver of the day. Pilot Chris Stricklin climbed to about 1700 feet AGL "Above Ground Level" before starting his "pull-down to the Split-S maneuver". Unfortunately the manuever requires an ground clearance of 2500 feet to pull off.

He immediately realized something was wrong and had seconds to pull back. He rolled slightly left to make sure he'd avoid the crowd, but did not have enough altitude to avoid the crash. 0.8 seconds before the F-16 hit the ground, Stricklin hit his eject button. The plane was 140 feet above the ground.

So what happened? Stricklin had practiced the manuever in Nevada, but apparently they had always used MSL altitudes - "Mean Sea Level", and apparently Stricklin flew to his usual MSL altitude... which was much closer to the ground in elevated Idaho.

An investigation found that "The requirement for demonstration pilots to real time convert MSL to AGL numbers, a maneuver with a limited margin of error, and a preconscious level of awareness created a situation more susceptible to pilot error." In other words, the procedure was harder than it had to be, and so there was a chance for a pilot to make a mistake. Stricklin had to read the MSL number, do the math himself, and then call out the AGL number to the ground controller, all without delay. In his head, he accidentally cheated on the conversion.

Stricklin was only slightly injured in the whole thing. Nobody else was hurt. He now works a desk job at the Pentagon. The Air Force insists he is not being punished for the incident, which to me seems like the right thing.

Much more on this at AvWeb, including two videos of the event - one from in the cockpit, looking back at the pilot. When you watch the videos you realize how little time the pilot has to make all these decisions.
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