Shoreham Airshow aircraft crashes into A27 road

[Lightages]

Communist countries do not compromise on safety.

Hmmmm, isn't there a thread of a huge explosion in a port in China where all kinds of dangerous chemicals were stored together. Hundreds dead? How is that not a compromise on safety?

[TheElectricChicken]

Communist countries do not compromise on safety.

Hmmmm, isn't there a thread of a huge explosion in a port in China where all kinds of dangerous chemicals were stored together. Hundreds dead? How is that not a compromise on safety?

That's right, a greedy capitalist thought totally ignoring all the rules was a great way to make a few dollars, so he bribed some officials as well. He put money first.

There was a similar explosion in Waco Texas at a fertilizer plant where 14 people were killed. The plant in Texas stored more than 1,000 times as much as it needed to require government oversight, but didn't have any. It also didn't have any sprinklers, no fire walls, no deluge systems, and less public liability than your average kids birthday party with a jumping castle.

Difference is in communist China, they immediately arrest the people in charge. In Capitalist USA the government says 'oh well, these things happen and we cannot burden rich people too much with rules and so on." and the government pats itself on the back for doing a great job. Not the same as in China, or clothing sweatshops in Bangladesh, no in places like that they arrest people. In capitalism you're expected to kill people to make a buck and that is a 'good job'.

[TheElectricChicken]

Also the USSR may have had half as many causalities, but they also had half as many manned missions as the USA.

Communist countries do not compromise on safety.

So at the end of the day the reason people have died going to space is because it's hard work and the tech is still getting there. It has nothing to do with politics or overly (and possibly purposeful) naive interpretations and misrepresentations of it.

Rubbish. 40 % of the NASA space shuttle fleet exploded in the largest inflight space disasters OF ALL TIME. They HAD ejector seats IN the NASA space shuttle for it's first few flights and REMOVED them. What, as a safety improvement ? They're all barking mad at NASA, and in the Government too.

Bush was a moron who thought Moon-men working for less than minimum wages in sweatshops would build NASA rockets cheaper on the moon than on earth. Just to prove it wasn't some 'senior moment' the NASA chief came out the next day and repeated it verbatim. Barking mad I tell you.

Here is what they said exactly. "Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive. Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy and thus far less cost."  Barking MAD. No wonder they couldn't put in ejector seats, they couldn't find their a&& with both hands and a roadmap. Just google that quote, quotation marks and all. President said it, NASA chief repeated it. Sending a workforce to the moon, provisioning them AND a factory to build rockets is cheaper than going to mars ? Only if they use what they've been smoking as rocketfuel to do all the moon launches it is.

The Soviet Russian space program btw, has had ON AVERAGE just a little over 1 space station in orbit continuously since 1971. NASA has never spent more than 2 weeks in space without absolutely relying on the Russians.

[Falcon69]

yes, but when the challenger exploded, ejecting out of the shuttle at that speed would have killed them i think?  I'm guessing you are talking about the challenger explosion.  I was in the 7th or 8th grade then.  I'm 41 now...so that was a long time ago.  i remember that everyone in the school watched in on a wheeled in TV....because a teacher was going up in it.  was very disturbing to all of us kids back then to see that.  they haven't allowed events to be watched live in public schools since then if i remember correctly.

[TheElectricChicken]

yes, but when the challenger exploded, ejecting out of the shuttle at that speed would have killed them i think?  I'm guessing you are talking about the challenger explosion.  I was in the 7th or 8th grade then.  I'm 41 now...so that was a long time ago.  i remember that everyone in the school watched in on a wheeled in TV....because a teacher was going up in it.  was very disturbing to all of us kids back then to see that.  they haven't allowed events to be watched live in public schools since then if i remember correctly.

Disturbing yes, it was even more disturbing / interesting to hear not long after that the manufacturers of the O ring seals had argued with NASA officials the morning of the launch telling them that the weather was too cold and the seals could fail. Naturally that would be long time buried nowdays, I mean, most people in the USA think that sally ride was the first woman in space, McDonalds printed that nonsense up on the wall. Then again they advertise bullshit like edison invented the lightbulb. The crap never ends.

[KJDS]

Remind me what Aeroflot was like in the 1980s when Russia was still communist

[wasyoungonce]

Anyhow, having seen the seats, especially the ones with rockets,

The Hunter had an MB Mk4. No rockets, just a gun charge. Remember, it was a 60 year old aircraft.

Hi Cimmo....they probably updated the seat at some stage?  Airforces always update seats and I'd reckon the people operating it may have also due to lack of spare for the old seat...aka "bang cartridges"?

[G7PSK]

It was mentioned on the news that there was un-detonated explosives in the ejector seat holding up the removal of the wreckage. As to whether that was a gun type or rocket seat I don't know but explosives make it sound like a gun type.   

[EEVblog]

i remember that everyone in the school watched in on a wheeled in TV....because a teacher was going up in it.  was very disturbing to all of us kids back then to see that.  they haven't allowed events to be watched live in public schools since then if i remember correctly.

Ridiculous and sad knee-jerk reaction. Kids shouldn't be "protected" from that.
I can remember in primary school watching an horrific documentary of piles of dead corpses being removed from concentration camps. You learn a lot watching stuff like that.
Bet they wouldn't dare show that to kids today. It's sad.

[dr.diesel]

Ridiculous and sad knee-jerk reaction. Kids shouldn't be "protected" from that.

Agreed.  I was in 5rd grade when that happened, they wheeled a TV in after the explosion and the entire school watched the replays for hours.

[Delta]

All the TV news reports I've seen about the crash show the footage of the jet coming down, but cut it before impact, then show the aftermath!
Are we really so sensitive in the UK now, or are the stations just scared of complaints?

Oh, and for those singing the praises of communist countries, one assumes that they have never actually lived in one...

[cimmo]

Anyhow, having seen the seats, especially the ones with rockets,

The Hunter had an MB Mk4. No rockets, just a gun charge. Remember, it was a 60 year old aircraft.

Hi Cimmo....they probably updated the seat at some stage?  Airforces always update seats and I'd reckon the people operating it may have also due to lack of spare for the old seat...aka "bang cartridges"?

Nope. Whilst in service the Hunter always had a Mk3 or Mk4 (The Hunter T.7 had the Mk 4H variant).

"Airforces always update seats"
NOT "always" at all. The RAF was notorious for not updating aircraft once in service.
And upon service retirement, the cost of certifying an updated version would have been prohibitive for any private owner. (Not to mention the actual cost of the hardware - a new modern seat quite possibly would have cost more than the rest of the aircraft - and in the Hunter T.7 there are two of them.)

Certification in the aviation world is NOT a trivial issue. They say that an aircraft only flies when the weight of the paperwork outweighs the weight of the aircraft (or so the story goes). And this paperwork does not come cheap.
Remember, these jet warbirds are either rich men's toys (who often do not care about the safety aspects beyond the minimum legally required) or operated by groups of enthusiasts without the bottomless pit of airforce funding (and therefore cannot afford the best potential safety - only what is legally required).

The bottom line is that since the regulatory authorities are far more concerned with primary safety - preventing any situation where an e-seat would be of any use (and therefore do not even require a fully functioning e-seat) I would be extremely surprised to find out that this aircraft had a newer seat design than a Mk4H.

[TheElectricChicken]

I can remember in primary school watching an horrific documentary of piles of dead corpses being removed from concentration camps. Bet they wouldn't dare show that to kids today. It's sad.

Interesting that in the second world war the USSR suffered the biggest losses. At least 27 million Soviet citizens died during the war defeating the Nazis, however when the last anniversary and memorial was held in Poland for the liberation of Auschwitz, Poland chose not to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin even though it was the Red Army which liberated Auschwitz and freed the Jews trapped there. Poland is on the US side in the US backed Ukrainian coup, so they don't like Russia right now, especially not as much as the Crimeans who held a huge referendum and voted to leave Kiev after the military Junta installed itself there, and try to re-join Russia.

http://www.rt.com/news/226543-poland-auschwitz-commemoration-putin/

Poland is GETTIN' BUSY re-writing history, to leave the Russians out of liberating the Jews from the Death camps.

http://www.rt.com/news/224891-poland-ukraine-liberated-auschwitz/

but that's nothing new, a lot of people are trying to re-write history.

http://www.rt.com/news/253753-europeans-wwii-victory-poll/

It's like hey, lose twenty something million people defeating Nazism and liberate the Jews and death camps, and what's the expression for ' totally ungrateful ' in this case, oh yeah, ' TOTALLY ungrateful ' is how it looks.  Putin instead attended a Jewish museum and tolerance center in Moscow.

I recall watching a RT documentary by one of it's regular reporters about her family being killed by the Nazis, she didn't know anything about it until someone found a box of letters. She lost 119 people from her family because they were Jews. http://www.rt.com/news/260493-rt-documentary-holocaust-slier/

Must seem confusing to the Russians and to the people at RT especially when so many of them were effected personally by the fight against the Nazis. Larry King, who has his own show on RT, I didn't hear him say much about it though, but the other Jewish staff sure seemed perplexed by the ingratitude.

Sorry for getting off topic !!!

[TheElectricChicken]

I don't know about live events in the UK, but I know that Japanese TV still shows some Japanese astronauts being launched if the time is convenient. [...]They showed the towers collapsing on 9/11 live, and the 11/3 tsunami. I remember watching both of those.

I like their live TV too, but the censorships is totally overwhelming. If you got NHK and nothing else, I'd say 3 or 4 days and a person would want to put a shotgun in their mouth. I recall how during the Fukushima disaster how the media 'switched' from honest reporting to 100 % Bullsh@# claiming for the evacuation that engineers intended to vent some gas and people had to move back. Sure, not causing panic has it's place, but they never, ever, ever, have switched back to normal. It's STILL 100% bulls#% as Fukushima empties hundreds of tons of radioactive groundwater into the ocean each week. They have no desire to control the disaster because it is so expensive and controlling information is so cheap. NHK is intolerable for long periods.

[TheElectricChicken]

Argh ! off-topic. please let's start a new thread for this mojo-chan!

Watching those documentaries a person would know far more than the average westerner [....]

well, that invites defining the average westerner. Lets not go there, NHK paints a bright and rosy picture because they read government script. Reality differs from the propaganda on NHK.

Typhoon Nangka caused radioactive water and soil to flow from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and into the Pacific Ocean, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has admitted.

http://www.naturalnews.com/050707_fukushima_radioactive_soil_typhoon_nangka.html

50 CUBIC MILES, THAT IS, MILES, OF RADIOACTIVE WATER IS EITHER BEING INTENTIONALLY DUMPED OR IS ALLOWED TO LEAK INTO THE PACIFIC OCEAN EVERY YEAR FROM THE DAIICHI#1 FACILITY IN JAPAN, MAKING IT A 200 CUBIC MILES "MINI-OCEAN" OF HAZARDOUS WASTE AND THAT VAST EXPANSE IS BUILDING AS I TYPE.

http://havacuppahemlock1.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/fukushima-dumped-200-cubic-miles-of.html

Officials: 6,000% cancer rate increase in Fukushima children’s thyroids — Expert: Urgent countermeasures against the suspected outbreak are necessary — Professor: Gov’t stopped me from checking thyroid exposure levels after 3/11 (VIDEO)

http://enenews.com/officials-6000-increase-thyroid-cancer-rate-among-fukushima-children-asahi-16-new-cases-detected-first-3-months-2015-professor-urgent-countermeasures-against-suspected-outbreak-necessary-govt

[IO390]

It's funny how every thread on EEVblog ends up discussing some meaningless (usually political) drivel. This is why I'm rarely here.

On the actual topic, Eric Brown made a public statement that it was totally pilot error, too low at the top of the loop etc... He was there that day and I was planning to meet him, but point being he saw that and if he's confident enough to publicly say that, then theres probably not much that can be learned from looking at the wreckage.

Currently, any possible failure of the aircraft can be debunked, at least any that I can think of. Would be nice if a problem was found though, but I'm not sure there's any excuse for the altitude and I the top of the loop. May be wrong altimeter setting (perhaps set for north Weald where he came from) but that's still his fault.

[SeanB]

Ejection seats a rocket or a pyro gas generator driving a piston are pretty much the same in performance. Both get you out of the plane and above the tail so you do not get sliced into pieces. Limit is the acceleration of the initial push, too much and you break fragile things like necks and backs, and to little and you are sliced like bacon. In any case the seats do have a small delay from initiation, so that things like canopy separation ( but there is a penetrator in any case at the top of the seat if this does not work), harness tension and such can occur before the main event.

If you as a pilot did not put the straps on to the leggings on sitting in the cockpit, so you have your legs pulled off the pedals, they will call you stumpy, as the instrument panel will trim you off at the knees. You might have 2 broken ankles, but at least you will be able to walk. You also are lifetime limited as to how many times you can eject and remain a fighter pilot. 2 strikes and your back might not survive no 3.

I know of one pilot who was compressed 10cm in his unanticipated deplaning, though he did almost make it to the runway. He decided to eject after looking up from the instruments, and saw trees above the canopy. Basically landed next to the fireball, and luckily the fire brigade arrived in 2 minutes to put out the river bed and what was left of the plane. His new nickname was the $10M man....... He was also doing an airshow at 300m, and swallowed a vulture.

My friend Gav was also there, and as he was an armourer, and had serviced that seat, he was very glad it did as designed. Biggest worry I had sitting in the seat to work was checking **EVERY** time I was head over the sill that those 2 locking pins were in. I knew a guy who was sitting and the seat fired. That was a closed coffin funeral, and I was part of the honour guard.

[firewalker]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law