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Comment by jcgrillo | Hacker News Reader

Arms and legs can take a serious beating too. Airplane cockpits are pretty tight spaces, and to be explosively shot out of one with little notice is.. yikes.

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Ejection is often a career-ending event, unfortunately. Better than dying though.

How so, because of the damage to the body?

They impart significant g forces (~15g) in line with the spine. Compression fractures are common, and most people permanently lose height as a result of the event. The goal is to provide a result better than death.

You're generally limited to two ejections barring any disqualifying health issues. The military doesn't like to throw away its personnel investments when they've gained some hard won experience.

Needless to say, crashing jets at an air show is not going to help anyone’s career.

To my eye, only the pilot of the rearmost plane is in trouble. The one in front was (more or less) flying straight ahead.

It’ll be interesting to see the official findings.

Agreed. It only takes one of them to have an issue or be out of position. Like you say, it’ll be interesting to see what they come back with after a thorough investigation.

The pilots themselves initiated their ejections.

Admittedly I have nowhere near the flight hours, training, or expertise of these pilots, but having flown airplanes myself I can totally imagine in an off-nominal situation (which I have been in before) conscious focus is fully on flying the airplane even if your rote lizard brain is procedurally going through the motions of pulling the ejection handles or otherwise responding to the emergency. My instructor's words--he was a helicopter pilot (Hueys and Chinooks) in the Vietnam war with some 20k hrs logged in complex aircraft, jets, etc. since so I know for certain he knew wtf he was talking about--going through my head "do not ever stop flying the airplane". In this case, my conscious focus would be to stomp one of those rudder pedals as hard as I could to try to recover from the spin, even if I was also simultaneously yelling "eject" or whatever you're told to into the intercom and pulling the handles. But I haven't ever been trained to eject from an aircraft, or maybe my instinctive predilections would select me out of the training regimen these pilots go through.. who knows

Also, these are aircraft with two crew. Either can initiate the ejection sequence, at which point both crew will be ejected regardless of who initiated if I’m not mistaken.

I’ve never trained to eject, but I have trained in situations with parachutes, and the advice is to deploy early. If the thought crosses your mind, the answer is yes.

Yes, that too

Sufficient training overrides your lizard brain.

But yes, pilots still trying to fix stuff when they should have ejected is a common problem.

I would think that when the two planes struck each other both of the pilots would have realized that something had gone seriously wrong and things were not going to be recoverable with a checklist. But yea, in other situations where it isn’t as clear cut, I can definitely imagine a pilot trying to work the problem all the way into the ground.

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