Ken Thompson flies a MiG-29 (1999)
cm.bell-labs.com
cm.bell-labs.com
http://www.l39.com/content/incidents
For comparison, the motorcycle fatality rate is about 0.1% per registered motorcycle per year,
http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
After skimming a few of the reports, at least 2 of the accidents were due to racing or aerobatics. I imagine that carries somewhat of a risk regardless of aircraft.
I've always dreamed of owning an L-39 since that can be had for around $200K http://www.internationaljets.com/jetaircraft.html
Yes, I should have said this explicitly. The risk isn't caused by it being poorly-engineered, but that as an aerobatic fighter jet it will tend to attract risk seekers. So I guess it'd be analogous to, say, crash rates involving sports cars.
Not just risk but showing off. In a similar manner most crashes involving home builts / experimentals is low and slow showing off. Its the cessna 172 pilots that croak because of get-home-itis and bad weather and bad navigation and related CFIT.
Its hard to get killed at 8000 ft other than maybe catastrophic disassembly (well, here, where the highest mountain is only 1600 ft...). But seemingly anything happens at 100 feet and you're pretty much dead, unless you're lucky.
Low altitude flight is very much like drunk driving which is safe at least 99.99% of the time if not more, but if anything ever happens oh boy are you in trouble...
http://www.controller.com/listingsdetail/aircraft-for-sale/M...
http://www.warbirdsnews.com/warbirds-news/airplane-mig-21um....
http://www.globalplanesearch.com/usa/aerobatic/jets/mig/
However, I've heard that hiring a pilot to teach you how to fly it without killing yourself runs about $2000/hour, and without the training, your chance of killing yourself on the first flight is pretty close to 100%.
The office just happens to be right on a flight line. :)
But my sister and mother live in Colorado Springs. Of late, I've noticed it's become cheaper and more convenient to fly into DEN and drive down to the Springs, instead of booking a flight right into COS. So, I've become more familiar with Denver as a result.
At 8000 meters, Vladimir took over and performed a cobra
maneuver. He flew level and pulled up so fast that the
plane stalled. The plane continued to move horizontally
in a flat stall while pointing up. At some point Vladimir
performed some magic and the plane leaned over horizontal
and flew normally. The result was a loss of 300 kmph in
seconds. This was described to me as a courtesy maneuver
to allow tailgating traffic to pass.
@quickpost Thanks you answered my question.
They sure can :) They can also do tail slides.
The aerodynamics of both the MiG-29 and Su-27 are modelled on a TsAGI [1] reference design, so they share similar flight characteristics.
Mikoyan cut some corners with the structure that limit the MiG-29 to 7.5G above a certain airspeed ( 0.85M ) whereas the '27 is capable of 9g throughout its envelope.
[1] The Soviet-era equivalent of NASA Ames FRC, with a bit more clout
But it would have been helpful to have included a full date. Somewhere? Anywhere. Even (especially!) the URL? Sheesh!
A quick google indicates this took place in 1994, as indicated by this usenet post to rec.aviation.stories:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.aviation.stories...
My vanity site has html with very light css, no javascript. Works ok on Blackberry as well as laptop. Loads fast. All static so very small bandwidth/processor use (shared hosting). Emergency edits using ssh / nano.
I'm wondering how much electricity we use serving and parsing all the presentation code with modern sites?
[1] http://colinramsay.co.uk/2014/04/23/i-am-so-annoyed-about-rs...
[2] I'm not bigging up my own site here, just the general principle!
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.aviation.stories...
http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php?topic=16574.0
And "cal 1999" where it looked like Dec. 11 - 17 was a traditional week.
Then came the acrobatics. It was the same as the L39 but six G's instead of
four G's and 4000 meters altitude instead of 2000 meters. At this time I realized
that the ground crew had not connected my G suit to the pneumatics in the
plane. At the bottom of every loop, my vision went from color to
black-and-white. It happened in about a second like someone pulled down a
no-color shade in front of my face. Shortly after that, the
black-and-white
faded into grey-and-grey and finally just grey. Very strange feeling.
I didn't black out but I was able to know exactly what it would feel like.
After the G's subsided, my vision returned in reverse sequence.> Was it worth it? Yes. Would I do it again? No.
Mass with a 900kg fuel load looks to be around 12,000kg Max thrust is 162kN for both with afterburner.
500km/h = 139m/s 1000km/h = 278m/s Going from one to the other in 5s means an average acceleration of 27.8m/s^2... or almost 3 g, which is monstrous!
But how does this work? Solving F=ma for a gives a=F/m = 162000/12000 = 13.5m/s^2
And that's before accounting for the not insignificant thrust required just to overcome the aerodynamic drag.
Is it just an understandable overestimation of the acceleration due to the direct experience of it? Or am I missing something?
Either way, awesome.
MiG-29 recently made headlines in India, the first and one of the largest export user, when one crashed
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/mig29-cra...
here's the kind of thing offered here : http://aircombat.com/about/our-aircraft/
fast and aerobatic planes, but not fighters.
In general, the Russian stuff translates better to private ownership because there is much less specialized support equipment or maintaince required - in general the soviet's built stuff for a real SHTF scenario, where-as the US was much more willing to complicate the design to gain a small edge.
A few seconds later, you hear the sound
Treetop training looks fun (they are always in pairs and I'm sure they are playing tag) but I imagine can be a bit tense...
Mind you - nothing beats the time as a kid when I got to watch a Vulcan doing low level aerobatics above the village I grew up in - an amazing sight and quite a remarkable sound!
Shame I was colour blind and didn't get told till I was 15 (at which point my career choices were Astronaut, Fighter Pilot, SAR helicopter pilot).
Then there was the sight of the C-5A supply flights coming in, directly over the roof... easy to make out the tread on the nosewheel, and every detail of the fuselage. Wingtips out at about a 120-130 degree angle, looking up... will never forget that sight.