When he has to step over the side while the aircraft was flying low and goin’ slow; too slow in fact. This unfortunate accident occurred in Alberta Canada, while a demonstration pilot was practicing for this weekend’s airshow. The Canadian government is withholding any official comment until the Department of Transportation and Department of National Defence’s Flight Safety Team complete their investigations.
Based on eyewitness descriptions of the incident, and the dramatic photographs of the plane’s impact, it sounds to me like the aircraft lost it’s starboard engine:
Private pilot Nathaniel Lockheart was watching the practice runs when he noticed something was wrong.
“He came in right over us, probably only 100 to 200 feet high,” he said. “It looked like he lost power out of his right engine. Only one afterburner was on and it was burning red hot.
“He looked very close to stalling…”
Which is part of what happened, as can be seen in the film footage of the accident. An aerodynamic stall occurs when an aircraft is either moving too slow, or pitched up at too large an angle of attack, or a combination of both, and as a result the wing can suddenly no longer provide the amount of lift necessary to keep the ship airborne. A stall can develop into a spin if one wing drops lower than the other. Typically both stalls and spins can be recovered from given enough altitude to regain the necessary velocity to generate an amount of lift equal to, or greater than, the weight of the aircraft. But unfortunately Captain Bews was only around 100 feet above ground level!
He simply didn’t have enough altitude to recover. And even though his remaining engine was firewalled, with the afterburner lit, on a single engine the CF-18 couldn’t generate enough raw thrust for him to “power” his way out of it. In fact, the remaining engine probably contributed to his low-speed loss of control.
Full discosure; I’ve never flown an F-18 Hornet. But the principles of flying high performance twin engined fighter aircraft are similar, especially when it comes to the in-flight engine failure procedures. Perhaps the most important principle is to keep your airspeed comfortably above the stall speed, especially when flying low; except, of course, when you are preparing to land. Another very important principle is to never roll the aircraft in the direction of the failed engine. The reason is, because of the natural offset of the engines from centerline of the ship that is inherent in twin engine fighters, any engine out situation will result in a tendency for the aircraft to yaw in the direction of the failed engine. So a banked turn in the direction of the failed engine will result in the nose of the plane being yawed toward the ground. Which, you know, is especially bad if you’re at low altitude; or near stall speed as it will probably develop into a spin.
Which, based on my viewing of the video, is what must have happened in this instance. Captain Bews is a highly trained and skilled professional aviator, as evidenced by his selection for the demonstration team, so I have to believe that what caused his starboard wing to dip was the buffeting that occurs when an aircraft stalls; because with the starboard engine out, travelling at low altitude and speed, I can’t belive that he would have intentionally rolled his jet to that side for any reason.
It’s a good thing that his CF-18 was equipped with a Martin-Baker ejection seat certified for “zero/zero” operation; you can get a good look at it in this set of pictures. I’m sure Captain Bews is a big fan of that seat tonight, because it sure pulled his chestnuts out of the fire. Thank God he only sustained minor injuries, and is reported to be in good spirits and resting at the hospital.
Here are some stills from the film:
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Here Captain Bews is coming in at very slow speed at what looks like a very high angle of attack. At this point the aircraft may have already begun to stall; but it’s hard to tell from this perspective.
Click to enlarge
And in this one the starboard wing is beginning to dip; the aircraft rolling to the side with the failed engine-not good.
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Here the adverse yaw effect is beginning to direct the nose towards terra firma; a most undesireable effect when you’re only 100 feet above ground level.
Click to enlarge
Realizing he’s lost it, and probably entering a spin at low altitude, low speed, and with a failed engine, Captain Bews makes the only reasonable decision and punches out.
Anyway, kind reader, that’s enough “shop talk” for this installment. Take a moment, watch the film, and see how despite our best intentions unexpected circumstances can turn a routine exercise into a life threatening situation. And next time you get in your car to run around the corner, buckle up, and strap in your children; because just like Captain Bews saftey equipment saved him, yours will likely save you also.
And really, we can’t afford to lose any of you!
May God bless you, keep you, guide your steps always.
Sheesh. Good that Captain Bews survived, and that no one on the ground was injured either.
The most amazing bit of flying, evah.
Great video serr8d, I may turn that into a post itself!
I dunno, because if you look real close OMG!!!
I can’t get that video in Vancouver to play. I tweaked all my Adblock, NoScript and Ghostery toys; still no video.
I blamed the flawed Canadian press.
(Looking closely at the top pic, you can almost see the pantload that’s swelling Captain Bew’s backside. Or maybe that’s just my imagination… ;D)
I missed that detail the first time through! I’m sure that having to eject is a sphincter puckering experience; one that I never had to experience first hand, thank God.
Although I have experienced in-flight engine failure.
it’s a pretty intense video – nose up stall to starboard – when pilot at 90 degrees, he punches out – stall and nose into the turf. he is said to be ok, landing unconscious and being dragged by his chute a couple hundred feet.
the interviewed a man who witnessed it – looking a bit like Janet Reno and sounding a bit like Himmler.
I’ll do it before Tohr does – I blame the Joooooooooows. And Busch.
You forgot to add Reagan to the list. Because our man blames him for all societies ill’s since 1980.
Here’s a music-video-flight of fancy you might appreciate, Bob.
I didn’t see anything in the video which indicated an engine problem. It could have happened, but I don’t trust ground observers. The accident report will yield the answer.
However, what I saw was a fighter flying deeper into an unrecoverable situation. Slow flight in a high performance fighter is on the edge of control. Induced drag increased dramatically and it can quickly get behind the power curve whereby there isn’t enough power available to fly out of the condition.
One other thing. I don’t know specifically about the CF-18, but looking at the head-on picture, I see no flaps or flaperons extended at all. That makes it all the more difficult to fly out of such a low speed, high AOA situation.
Look at the exhaust nozzles in the high res pics. One is in afterburner (flared to create an hourglass profile in the duct; necessary for the supersonic flow when reheat is on) and one is not. The right engine was clearly malfunctioning. The airplane’s movements agree with this.
The demo maneuver he was doing was a clean low speed pass. Perfectly safe as long as an engine doesn’t crap out just when it is needed…
Some interesting observation sammy small. I didn’t mention it in the articlem because it seemed too much like an “inside baseball” observation to me, but I’d encourage you to look at the series of still photos I linked to; especially the first picture in the series.
Look closely at the engine nozzles in the rear of the aircraft. You’ll see that the starbord side nozzle is un-dilated, in what appears to be the “full grunt”, full military power setting, configuration while the port side is the full open dilated configuration-which makes sense. On afterburning jet engines, the nozzles are almost completely dilated at idle settings, narrow for higher throttle settings at subsonic speeds, but dialate again when the burner is lit to accomodate the higer flow rate.
Now as you said we won’t know for sure until the investigation is complete. But based on the visual clues of the nozle configuration, I suspect that either the engine failed and Captain bews responded to the need for power by lighting the burner on the remaining good one, or perhaps burner blowout, due to the nozzle failing to dilate, was the cause of the engine failure itself.
That’s why I took for granted the wittness’ description of the engine being out.
You are correct though, in your observation that a very high level of induced drag is inherent during a high alpha pass maneauver. And, as I mentioned, after the engine failure there was no way that the pilot could keep up with the power demands, and didn’t have the altitude to drop the nose, reduce the drag, and recover.
And your observation of the the dangers of slow speed flight in a high performance fighter is partially correct; flight in near stall conditions is dicey for any aircraft that doesn’t enjoy a high thrust/weight ratio. Slow speed flight is more a problem with delta wing configurations than the F-18’s planform, although to some extent all aircraft lose significant control surface authority at slow speed due to the wing’s optimization for high speed flight. And, to be fair, high levels of induced drag also accompany increased flap settings, because induced drag is fundamentally drag due to lift; which is why it increases with increasing alpha, since the lift coefficient is linear with respect to alpha until the wing stalls, or when C/L is increased by extending flaps.
Still, you’re right that it appears that no flaps were extended. And. I couldn’t tell from the photos whether the leading edge extension were deployed either; LEX’s trip the flow turbulent across the wing’s upper surface and, although they increase drag a bit as well, delay separation substantially. They are one reason that the F-18 can sustain such high AOA and contributes to its maneuverability.
So, while you bring up good points, I think I’ll stick with my suspicion that the engine failed while the pilot was executing a high alpha pass and, because of the drastically redued thrust/weight ratio and low altitude was unable to regain control-which led instead to a demonstration of the Martin-Baker “zero/zero” ejection seat!
And, as someone elsewhere pointed out, a real demonstration of modern ejection-seat technology.
The picture Theo Spark, among others, has shows the airplane from the side elevation. The rockets on the seat have already brought Capt. Bews to a near-upright position, the drag chute is already deployed — and the blown-out canopy is still in shot!
Regards,
Ric
Dakota435: I looked at the pic again and did see the subtle difference in nozzle size upon a second look.
So is this typically started in mil power with a transition to ab at some point? Was this an engine failure or just a failure of an ab lightoff?
Either way, there is no room for recovery if you fly into this kind of situation and experience an significant glitch like an engine problem. Remember the Mig-29 crash at the Paris Airshow in 1989? SSDD. I guess that’s what make airshows exciting.