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278 points Michelangelo11 | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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yellow_lead ◴[] No.45038691[source]
> Five engineers participated in the call, including a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer and three specialists in landing gear systems, the report said.

I can't imagine the stress of being on this call as an engineer. It's like a production outage but the consequences are life and death. Of course, the pilot probably felt more stressed.

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airstrike ◴[] No.45039409[source]
I don't think there was ever a risk of the plane crashing with the pilot still in the cockpit, despite the fact that the headline sort of leads people to that conclusion.

The pilot could eject at any time. Still dangerous, but more of a debugging session to avoid other similar costly in the future than a Hollywood-like "if we don't solve this now the pilot dies"

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codyb ◴[] No.45039579[source]
Doesn't ejecting from a plane potentially break bones? I think it's pretty intense. Good on the pilot for doing the debug session
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keepamovin ◴[] No.45040255[source]
It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.
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shawabawa3 ◴[] No.45040647[source]
Also isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?
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1. Tuna-Fish ◴[] No.45041253[source]
Not with modern Martin-Baker seats. IIRC since 2000, something like 800 ejections have happened, of which one lead to a fatality, which was caused by improper maintenance to the seat. (Martin-Baker was chastised for not warning maintainers of the specific risks of overtightening certain bolts above printed spec.)

When Russians were still flying planes deep over Ukraine, they have something like a 50% fatality rate on ejection, but that might be exacerbated by Ukrainian locals often finding the ejected pilots before any military force does, and people getting bombed have historically not liked the people flying the bombers much. When a pilot on the ground has a lot of bruises and a snapped neck, it's often hard to identify whether that happened during the ejection, during the landing, or after. And even when the cause was clearly violence, the emergency services might not be overly interested in blaming anyone or anything but the seat.

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2. LorenPechtel ◴[] No.45044240[source]
And note the situation over Ukraine. There are systems like the Patriot--you do not want to be above the horizon to one of them. But so long as you're some distance from the launcher and stay very low the Patriot can't see you. But that puts you very much in danger from stuff like a Stinger and when one finds your engine you're going to go in very, very fast.