My dad was reprimanded for not following orders ejecting when the engine on his F-86 failed. He did the calculations and figured he could make the field, which he did.
They said the pilot was far more valuable than the airplane.
They said the pilot was far more valuable than the airplane.
An F-86 ranged from $180-$580k in 1950 dollars, depending on the model. That's around $2.4-7.8 million now. That's quite a bit lower than the statistical value of human life that is currently used by the government for regulatory analysis, which is $13.1 million.
An F-35 is something like $80-$110 million. Even if we add the cost of training for the pilot, which Google tells me is $10.1 million for an F-35, to the statistical life value we only get $23.2 million which is only 21-29% of the cost of the plane.
[1] https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cd2a1348e...
The number of years the military gets to keep a trained pilot is limited, so that’s also a factor.
The more significant one is that so few people prove to be capable and willing to be fighter pilots. Replacement is not a given.
1 https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-much-does-it-cost-the-a...
1. know the optimal glide speed. Since the jet was traveling much faster than that, he pulled up the nose to trade excess speed for altitude.
2. trim the airplane for optimal gliding
3. push the nose down to maintain optimal glide speed
4. work the math on altitude, air pressure and sink rate to get distance traveled
This was long before calculators (1950s) so he had to know the formulae and the figures. I read one of his certification tests for flying jets, and you had to know an awful lot.
When I was at Boeing I was told that one of the engineering marvels on a jet was the mechanical computer that managed the engine, reducing it to a single lever for the pilot.
P.S. ejection seats were new in those days, with bugs that could injure or kill the pilot. He figured it was safer to glide the bird in.