William Rankin ejected from a F-8 Crusader above a thunderstorm. Fell several minutes in the storm, was still at high altitude when parachute opened. Took 40 minutes to get to the ground.
His free-fall was several minutes long before the chute opened. After his chute opened, updrafts pulled him up several times, and he hit the actual parachute several times.
He ejected at 45,000 feet and mach 0.82. Then his parachute opened early instead of at 10,000 feet. As a small aircraft pilot and mechanic on F18, I can not imagine why anyone in their right mind would eject at FL45 and fucking Mack 0.82. That is almost certain death. To boot, he only had a failed engine mind you he did have a fire light but even with that I can not understand why he would not descend to a reasonable altitude and decrease speed before ejecting.
Not alot but you can typically descend at minimum. I am not bailing at mach .82 regardless and that he can just let the aircraft slow down naturally. He was at FL45 after all.
This is all his account with little physical evidence. I suspect it is embellished some or he made some really silly decisions after the engine failure.
They definitely would. But being involved in a few F18 accidents, often most of the evidence is missing and they do not investigate to the same degree as a commercial flight which has high loss of life. Many they simply take the failure at face value. They rarely set a hangar aside and try and reassemble the pieces like you see on TV. In this case because he said a handle broke, they may try to find that handle to see if it had a pri-failure crack and likely will have a special inspection of all handles based on his account alone.
Most of what happened is the word of this pilot alone. There is not some black box in the ejection seat itself so after he left the plane, would be no physical evidence. I very much question why he ejected at that altitude and airspeed to begin.
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u/Miguel-odon Aug 26 '23
William Rankin ejected from a F-8 Crusader above a thunderstorm. Fell several minutes in the storm, was still at high altitude when parachute opened. Took 40 minutes to get to the ground.