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F-18 Pilot Ejects Seconds Before His Plane Hits the Ground & Explodes into a Fireball

Video of Canadian CF-18 pilot Brian Bews ejecting from his airplane moments before it strikes the ground and explodes into an orange and black fireball. He was making a low speed pass when he stalled the airplane, i.e., it stopped flying because it lacked minimum flying speed, and flipped over and dropped from the sky.  I am sure the pilot had a lot of warning indicators going wild in his headset  just before he ejected.  It is normally a very bad idea to go low and slow close to the ground because there is not enough altitude to recover if the airplane stalls.

The pilot was very lucky he survived.  Too many times the pilot waits too long before ejecting while trying to recover the airplane.  Waiting too long usually means death.  At some point, it becomes impossible to eject safely, even with a modern high tech zero zero ejection seat.  During my days of flying the F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber for the USAF in the 1970s, the official rule was that if the airplane was out of control below 10,000 feet, eject.  There is just not much time to correct a problem when traveling at high speeds.  The Air Force knows from studying jet fighter accidents that waiting too long to eject has killed a lot of its fighter pilots.

When I was a student learning to fly the Phantom at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, in 1971 – 1972, an F-4 with two students in it crashed on the Gila Bend gunnery range during a practice bombing mission.  The crew was learning how to dive bomb at a 45 degree dive angle.  The student pilot got too steep during a dive bomb run.  His dive angle was much greater than 45 degrees.  The steeper the dive angle, the more altitude it takes to recover the airplane and avoid hitting the ground.  The ranger safety officer and the flight leader saw that the student was too steep and warned the student pilot.  A steep dive bomb run has less than 10 seconds from starting the dive until pull out, which is not much time while speeding toward the ground at 450 knots.

Somebody realized that the airplane was approaching the point of no return and yelled over the radio for the crew to eject.  They did.  The backseater ejected safely, but the frontseater hit the ground before his parachute opened.  The F-4 front ejection seat fires 3/4 of a second after the backseat fires.  That means the frontseater would have lived if he had ejected one second earlier.

Ejection seat technology has saved a lot of lives.  The F-4 had a Martin Baker ejection seat with zero zero ejection capability.  Zero zero means that a man sitting in the ejection seat fully strapped in would be able to successfully eject if the altitude were zero and the airspeed were zero.  The F-4’s ejection seat with its rocket motor could blast  a man 300 feet from the airplane.  However, zero zero can be offset by the downward velocity of a stricken airplane.  For example, if your airplane is descending at 500 knots, that is 845 a second.  It the upward velocity of the ejection seat were 300 feet per second, the net downward velocity would be 545 feet per second.  If the ejection shoots the pilot out horizontal, then there is no upward velocity to offset the downward velocity.

The ejection seat with its rocket motor is also a very dangerous device.  Too many people have been killed and injured from accidental discharges of ejection seats on the ground during maintenance or accidents involving pilots and their seats.  The F-4 ejection seat had seven safety pins in it when not in use.  All were designed to prevent the accidental firing of the seat.  If a single safety pin were not removed, the seat would not fire.  Each of the safety pins was connected by a nylon line to all of the other pins.  Before getting into the cockpit, we had to check to make sure that six of the seven safety pins were removed and that the seventh pin on the top of the seat was inserted into its slot.  We removed the seventh safety pin after sitting in the seat and strapping in, which involved two connections to the survival kit in the seat, one lap belt, two parachute  / lap belt connections, and four leg restraints.  Although I loved my ejection seat, I was also very much afraid of it.

See still photos of the crash.  The black thing below and to the right of the pilot is the ejection seat after it separated from the pilot.  See also Flying the F-4 and Dressed for the Aerial Office.

Iraq Veteran in Grad School at Harvard Eloquently Explains Why Kagan Should be Rejected for the Supreme Court

We normally don’t get involved in political things like the Elena Kagan confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, but I watched and listened to a YouTube video of testimony given by Army Captain Pete Hegseth in the Elena Kagan confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate that convinced me that the Senate should reject her nomination to the court.  The Captain’s statements really hit home with me as a military veteran.

Captain Hegseth is a graduate of Princeton University and is pursuing a masters degree at Harvard University.  He is an Iraq war veteran now serving  as an infantry officer in the Massachusetts Army National Guard.  Please watch the video.  The crux of the Captain’s argument against Elena Hagan is:

  1. The U.S. is a nation at war.
  2. Our enemy wants to destroy us.
  3. Kagan’s actions with respect to banning military recruiters at Harvard were unbecoming a civic leader and a nominee for the Supreme Court.
  4. Kagan refused to allow military recruiters to recruit at Harvard because of the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy.
  5. Kagan’s action “prevented the military from having equal access to top notch recruits during a time of war.”
  6. “We’re nominating someone who unapologetically obstructed the military in a time of war?”
  7. She impeded, rather than empowered “the warriors who have fought and fallen for this county?
  8. Although Kagan talks nice about the military, “actions always speak louder than words.”
  9. “Miss Kagan’s actions toward recruiters with wars raging overseas undercut the military’s ability to fight and win wars and they trump her rhetorical explanation.”
  10. “In 2004 . . . Miss Kagan took the law into her own hands blocking military recruiters in direct violation of law.”
  11. Kagan said she opposes the military’s discriminatory recruitment policy, “but as a legal scholar she know better.  She knows the policy she abhors is not the military’s policy, but a policy enacted by Congress and imposed on the military.”
  12. While at Harvard Kagan invited and met with numerous members of Congress who voted for the don’t ask, don’t tell law.
  13. Harvard law school has three chairs endowed by Saudi Arabia which executes gays.

“The real moral injustice in granting a lifetime appointment is someone who when it matters most, treated military recruiters as like second class citizens.”

More Evidence that the American Education System Gets an F for Not Educating Americans

I love Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” where he goes on the street and asks people simple questions about the United States.  It’s funny, but very sad.  Americans can tell you who won American Idol, but don’t have a clue about the history of our great country.  This video is about the 4th of July and U.S. history.  Do an experiment and ask people under 45 the questions Jay asks.  The American education system has failed recent generations of Americans because it has not educated young people.  At the end of the segment, Jay asks a grandfather the questions that stumped the other people and he rattles correct and immediate answers to every question.  It’s proof that at one time the U.S. education system educated young people about the history of the United States.

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s Video on Obama’s Failure to Secure the Arizona Border

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer met with President Obama in the White House and asked the President to enforce federal immigration law and secure the Arizona border.  President Obama has taken steps to answer her plea, but Governor Brewer is not happy.  She rips Obama for his response and failing to do his duty.  In the below video, Governor Brewer vents about the new signs the Bureau of Land Management installed 80 miles north of the border and just 30 miles from Phoenix.

The feds new signs are chilling when you consider that Obama is warning everybody as far as 80 miles from Arizona’s border with Mexico  that the 80 miles from the sign to the border is dangerous and yet Obama will not do anything to eliminate the danger.  Oops, I almost forgot, President Obama will do one thing – sue to overturn Arizona’s immigration law to prevent Arizona from taking action to protect its citizens from the drug and human smuggling epidemic that Obama warns about.

Here is the text of the sign you will see behind Governor Brewer in her video:

DANGER – PUBLIC WARNING TRAVEL NOT RECOMMENDED

  • Active Drug and Human Smuggling Area
  • Visitors May Encounter Armed Criminals and Smuggling Vehicles Traveling at High Rates of Speed
  • Stay Away From Trash Clothing, Backpacks and Abandoned Vehicles
  • If You See Suspicious Activity, Do Not Confront, Move Away and Call 911
  • BLM Encourages Visitors to Use Public Lands North of Interstate 8

Here is another video by Phoenix TV station KPHO channel 5 about the new Obama administration warning signs, including another sign the BLM is installing along Arizona roads that says:

Travel Caution
Smuggling and Illegal
Immigration May Be
Encountered in This Area

Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Would you like to live in a state the federal government has declared to be unsafe because of illegal drug and human smuggling?
  2. Would you want your state government to do nothing to solve the problem?
  3. Would you want the federal government to do nothing to solve the problem?
  4. Should the U.S. be declaring Arizona unsafe and refusing to solve the problem and then sue Arizona when it takes action to protect its citizens from the danger created by the illegal drug and human smuggling?

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