Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Hangtime on December 12, 2001, 12:25:00 PM
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Ruh roh.
Hope the crew got out ok... :(
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All 4 crew members were rescued.
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excellent.
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Glad to hear they made it out OK. Capsule eject is a risky buisness.
I wonder if the Taliban has claimed responsibility for this downing yet? I expect it to be soon after claiming responsibility for a blackhawk loosing its landing gear.
AKDejaVu
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B1B's dont need much help in crashing they were in the news almost constantly for awhile. Glad they all got out.
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I was in when they were grounded. The base commander was doing his preflight when he looked up to see one of his planes doing an overflight with fire coming from its wing-root. Needless to say, the decision to ground them was made almost instantly.
The fuel cell rupturing (wing sweep issue) and bird strikes have claimed quite a few of these bombers. The irony of more being lost in training than ever saw combat (or were likely to see combat) did not escape anyone in the late 80's.
AKDejaVu
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playing the odds, bound to happen with number of sorties, just a matter of time
glad to see they have grabbed the crew
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I think we also lost a heluva lotta B29's before they were finally deployed.
Any new A/C programme has extreme risk, and the B1B's constant role change and redesign was an accident waiting to happen.
Still; we need this bird; and by all crew accounts it seems to be one heluva airplane.
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Originally posted by AKDejaVu:
Glad to hear they made it out OK. Capsule eject is a risky buisness.
AKDejaVu
Sure is. While I was stationed at Cannon AFB in '78-'79 two F111's went down. Crew survived one, didn't the other. Seems I remember hearing the rocket motors destroyed the chute on that one.
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The B-1B doesn't use capsule ejection. It has 4 conventional seats firing upwards. This design mod was made so late in the process that the windows in the back are now placed down around the back seater's elbow and are useful only as "day/night indicators". The ejection seats are raised significantly from the original seat position. I'm not sure what kind of survival gear they carry (larger crew style raft in addition to single man rafts?) but I know there have been recent cuts in the survival gear that tankers carry so the KC-10 that was the on-scene SAR asset probably didn't have much to drop to them.
In any case, it was good to hear that they got out ok.
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Ah.. I can believe they changed to ejection seats... but that is not how the plane was originally designed.
The capsule eject was the cause of a few fatalities early in its service life... sounds like they went away from it.
AKDejaVu
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Hmmmmm... I've been searching and can't find any mention of a capsule eject with the B-1B... but I'm sure it existed at some time (maybe in the B-1A?). There's not really much history on the plane, just up-to-date info.
AKDejaVu
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I kept searching and stumbled across this at http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8629/lancer.htm (http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8629/lancer.htm)
The B-1A was designed with a speed of Mach 2+ in mind but the specification of B-1B dropped the speed to Mach 1.2 which enable the B-1B to adapt a simpler wing sweep mechanism compare to the B-1A. The ejection system was also changed, instead of individual ejection for each crew member, the B-1B allows the entire crew to be eject in an jettisonable crew escapable capsule where the crew compartment would be blasted away from the plane by 2 solid fuel rocket and descend back to earth in 3 parachute.
I also stumbled across another site that mentioned a firing order for ejection... so its a tad bit confusing.
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Ah... rounded up this at http://www.af.mil/news/Jul1998/n19980709_981005.html (http://www.af.mil/news/Jul1998/n19980709_981005.html)
"Originally, the B-1 had an ejection capsule, but that had too much of a weight penalty," Santi said. "Individual ejection systems were simpler but involved four hatches and four crew members. We were able to develop a quick-sequencing system that extracted people without them running into each other. The big issue was diverging the seats."
Damn.. I knew it had one. I didn't know they moved away from it. I worked on F-111s and alot of sweep-wing capsule-eject stories would float back and forth.
And AKIron... We only had one ejection while I was at Mt. Home AFB (with F-111As). Unfortunately, the plane was inverted at about 300 feet when the pilots ejected on a cold January day. I was on the recovery team for that one... not a pleasant memory.
AKDejaVu
[ 12-12-2001: Message edited by: AKDejaVu ]
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Eagl is always right about USAF equipment.
B-1B has 4 ejection seats not a pod.
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Ahh.. it HAD a pod setup funkedup ;)
Give some people that have been out of the biz for 15years some credit too ;)
AKDejaVu
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You're right Deja, "had" :) If you look closely at some B-1B's, you can see a little triangle shaped bulge aft of the canopy where the pod stabilization fins used to be recessed. I'm not sure if they all have this or just a couple of converted ones...
I've talked to guys who survived F-111 ejections... That darn pod fell like a ton of bricks and quite often resulted in spine compression fractures even when everything worked properly. One poor sucker landed on the tippy top of a tree that penetrated the pod and his leg. The pod slid down the tree like a grape on a toothpick trapping them inside until they could be cut free.
F-111 pod trivia - The control stick worked as a bilge pump when pumped forward and aft, so the standard procedure following an ejection over water was to open your hatch, unbolt your control stick, and toss it out the window so the other crewmember had to do all the pumping ;)
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Hehehe.. yep.. I knew that about the 111 "bilge pump". The Other problem was the use of multiple chutes and relying on cushion/floatation bag deployments on the bottom of the capsule to soften the impact. A base commander had compressed his spine the year before I had arrived because the air cushion didn't deploy on an ejection. All 111's were later grounded when another had problems with 1 chute not deploying causing another spinal injury.
Of course, we had more spinal injuries in one single helecopter incident than in all F-111 ejections combined... but nevermind that ;)
AKDejaVu
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BTW... one of the leading causes of spinal injury during ejection is a result of the seat imacting your tailbone as the rockets fire. That's one reason why fighters have virtually no cushion on their flight seats.
AKDejaVu
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Hey Deja, I was a Mtn Home from 84 to 94. Knew a few guys that worked on the F111. They used to say the F111 was prove that with big enough engines and wings you could make a brick fly.
I was on the Search and Recovery team during the time of that crash (87?) but I was TDY to Fairchild and wasnt sorry I missed it. The explaination I remember was when the plane took off the canopy opened up on the student pilots side and the IP reached over trying to close it. For some reason one of the engines flamed out and the plane rolled over and they ejected at about a 90 degree angle right into the ground.
I think sometime after that maybe a year,was when one of the squadron commanders belly landed his F111 on the flightline because the gear wouldnt come down and there was no way he was going to eject, he didnt trust the ejection pod. Of course they didnt write it up that way, he gets credit for saving a valuable air force asset. The guys that saw him said it was a perfect landing minus the wheels of course.
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B1b crashed here in Kentucky a few years ago. Pilot said there was smoke in the cockpit and the controls werent responding. Crew ejected safely and plane continued flying a ways. Crashed 400meters from a house.
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now dont flame me, im honestly happy that the crew of the B1B made it home safely.
but regarding the ejection system, im glad they moved from a ejection pod to individual seats.
screaming, flailing of arms and crapping of pants is a personal, not a group thing. :D
p.s. <S> to all crews of the war against terrorism; land, sea, and ground.
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Hey Deja, I was a Mtn Home from 84 to 94. Knew a few guys that worked on the F111. They used to say the F111 was prove that with big enough engines and wings you could make a brick fly.
I was in Mt. Home from 86 to 90. I worked with the 366th EMS in Weapons Release Shop (the little shack on the flight line that had the lawn).
That "given big enough engines... " quote is actually from the F4 Phantom. It applies well to the F-111 though ;)
I think sometime after that maybe a year,was when one of the squadron commanders belly landed his F111 on the flightline because the gear wouldnt come down and there was no way he was going to eject, he didnt trust the ejection pod. Of course they didnt write it up that way, he gets credit for saving a valuable air force asset. The guys that saw him said it was a perfect landing minus the wheels of course.
There were a couple of them. One had a main gear wheel fall off (dunno root cause) and they hooked the barrier with the gear up and caused a bit of damage to the plane. The other was a nose gear problem (someone forgot to install a pin) and they also hooked the barrier and actually caused minimal damage (not even class a mishap). I do believe birdstrikes accounted for more damage than either of those two gear incidents.... especially that goose strike.
AKDejaVu
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I've got my pilot slot now, so hopefully within the next couple years, if all goes according to plan, I'll be in the front seat of a B-1. I'd love to talk shop about it with anyone who has some operational experience with the plane.
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I havent been operational in the B-1 or even flown in it, but I have been around it a number of times. That is one of the two possible aircraft I can be a WSO on once I finish flight school here at NASP, the other one being the F-15E. I am trying to get the F-15E but I will not be unhappy with the Bone of course. I have gotten to fly the full motion B-1 simulator several times and its a mighty awesome ride!