LOW flights by two military jets?

[Crouching Leopard]

Low level training routes are selected to avoid things like power lines. That way you could concentrate on the task at hand, flying. Most modern aircraft have TAWS, which alerts you to things like terrain and obstacles. Even my G1000 system in my personal aircraft does that. If they where older jets, we didn't have that tech. Thats why they selected the routes, so we didn't have those kind of challenges. New jets do have that tech. My obstacle database is updated on each Navigation Cycle in my updates, so it stays very current. When I flew at NOAA, if we had down time on the research projects, we flew chart check to add obstacles that went un-reported and delete obstacles that had been removed. There are very few excuses to run into stuff now. Our rules, which are similar to many other services around the world, are 500' unless your on a designated training route or in a training area. Lower than that, your showing off.

In the civil world, we must put a bubble around any single human of 500', lonesome Joe rule. Groups of humans 1,200'. You can go below 500' as long as it is safe to do so and not endanger yourself or others. This is open to interpretation and can lead to suspension of your license. I go low at times to get some of my photos, but in the middle of nowhere. In Africa, we flew low level a lot. Great scenery, few habitations and virtually no enforcement. I would however, usually check an area out high before I went low, charts sucked. Along with all this freedom went almost no chance of a rescue if you screwed up.

The Navy sent me to PG school for Aviation Safety, so I have an advanced degree in it. One of our main objectives is to observe our pilots & crews. There are trends you see in numbers that are recordable and there are personality traits that are undesirable. People evolve during their life, have issues along the way that change them. There is a balance between having enough aggression to do the job and a bit too much so it kills yourself and others. You don't necessarily want the "Maverick" character. They wreck equipment and kill folks trying to prove something. My primary aircraft cost $205,000,000 each, so we could quickly bankrupt the service if we wrecked or damaged them all the time. Not the kind of people we want flying them. Sat on a lot of Boards and lost 8 of my friends, it is a risky business, you mitigate the risks. The biggest category of attritment after the basic phase of flight school is "Headwork." The second is "No Apparent Fear of Death." Which is continuing down a decision path with will most likely result in your death. You have to laugh it off a bit, death, or you would never be able to get in the cockpit and come back and land on the carrier.

Never flew aircraft, but worked on defense missile systems which had their own potential for serious incident risk. I guess the "No apparent fear of death" thing applies to many current and former military people. It certainly does (on an intelligently calculated ) level to me today. Better to live a shorter interesting life than a long boring one.

I too have seen the end results of aircraft accidents. The same squadron that the pilot in my last post flew from had 2 fatal accidents in the previous 18 months. I walked through the hanger where the pieces of one of the Phantoms had been laid out on the floor for investigation. Not one piece larger than a regular suitcase and not a nice sight as, although I didn't know the pilot/navigator personally, in the airforce everyone was "family", and we all grieved to a degree.

At least with a drone, you can pick up the pieces mostly with one hand, and most of the time you don't impact (no pun intended) anyone else.

 

[Dogpilot]

Each country is different. Europe and the US are fairly draconian in requiring reports to be filed about towers and electricity line. The explosion of cell towers coupled with wind farms caused this to be fairly strictly enforced. The chart updates are automated now with this data going into digital databases. There is still the manual flying to update for tower removal, as that reporting is fairly lax.

Luckily, in Texas, where a lot of military flight training occurs, you may have noticed, there have been no new power lines added for decades.

 

[Crouching Leopard]

This French incident is weirdly reminiscent of one outside of Naples in the 60's. An F4 flew into the power lines and severed the wires feeding Naples. What was notable about it was the pilot. It was none other than Senator John McCain, then a Lt jg. His father was Chief of Naval Operations. So instead of being cashiered like the rest of us would have been he was sent to Viet Nam, where he was then very quickly shot down and entered history.

Flathatting, as it is called in the Navy when pilots show off, is immediate loss of your wings. It is considered incurable. My own squadron had one of the untouchables who liked to flathat. She ended up killing 23 folks in a mid-air with her boyfriend in his aircraft off Sardinia in the 80's.

So all that stuff in the movie "Top Gun" isn't true? Never!?

 

[Dogpilot]

Top Gun, I was at Miramar when they made that movie. Had us all cracking up. They had to add cushions to the seat so you could see the little guy's head above the canopy rails. If you have ever flown sitting on an ejection seat, you know there are no cushions, since the initial acceleration will very rapidly compress the foam and give you a whopping case of "seat slap" pretty much where you wouldn't want that to happen. Anyhow, a whole lot of eye rolling went on during the days they where on base. Afterwards though, we rather liked the movie, not for the movie's sake, but there was a huge upsurge in females suddenly thinking we were very desirable. Since we had been considered basically lepers up to that point, it was refreshing.

On a funny note, one of my buds just retired last December from Delta as a 777 Captain. The guy who played "Viper" attended his retirement party in La Jolla (Petro was a long time Tomcat pilot, active & reserve). He was the only one to be in both movies, besides the midget. He did crack me up that evening when he said, "The low altitude record has never been broken, only equaled!"

 

[Badgersurfer]

You would guess he was in a hard left bank at the time.

Would the be HSBC or Natwest?

 

[Cymru]

Would the be HSBC or Natwest?

I doubt it was NatWest. Its impossible to find a branch of that outside a major city these days!

 

[Crouching Leopard]

Many years ago (1978) I was in the Royal Air Force in Germany, serving in a Bloodhound MK2 Guided Missile Squadron as Radar Shift Chief.

One (up until then) quiet Sunday afernoon, I was stood on the Radar Plinth (about 50 feet up in the air) which was located about a hundred or so yards from the beginning of the runway, taking a break, admiring the beautiful North German Countryside and thinking how an average boy from a farming town in Yorkshire, England ended up doing this fantastic and exciting work.

At the far end of the runway, maintenance crews had raised the emergency aircraft capture net for routine maintenance, something that always took place on a Sunday as it seemed the Ruskies (Soviet Russians) didn't tend to invade our airspace on Sundays, so we didn't send fighters up to escort them out. The purpose of this net was to stop jets whose brake shutes failed, from careering over the boundary, across a narrow wooded area and civilian road, and into the German village of Wildenwrath that bordered the airbase. These nets stood at a maximum of about12 to 15 feet high. Just enough to cover the tail of a jet, and stretched the full width of a runway also designed to land civilian passenger aircraft. It was very rarely deployed but its existence was a safety requirement.

Anyway, this Sunday turned out very differently. Whilst I was watching, one of our Phantom Jets returned from an Intercept. The pilot was leaving the base the next day to go on to his next posting in the UK. As a sort of "goodbye Wildenwrath, thanks for all the beer and Bratwurst", instead of landing, he decided to do an extremely fast, extremely low-level pass over the runway, then climb steeply, bank left, circle round, and land. Unfortunately for him,it didn't quite work out that way.

At first, I watched in pure admiration at his incredible flying skills as he shot down the runway at a height of what must have been less than 10 feet off the ground, then in gobsmacked horror, as he careered further down the runway, then slammed on the afterburners and pulled near verticle when he saw the raised barriers dead in front of him. No use.

At what must have been 500 Miles per hour, he slammed into the nets, completely ripping out the nets, arrest mechanism, and a good part of the runway. What happened next is burnt into my memory. With the nets and attachments trailing wildly behind him and burning furiously in the afterburner jets, he climbed on his tail to a couple of thousand feet, leveled out, and circled around anticlockwise, nets, machinery, etc still burning and dropping off. Then he did a slow, low-level, safety inspection pass over the same runway so that Air Traffic could assess the damage and check the successful deployment of his undercarriage. My Air Traffic mate who was on shift that day shot off a green emergency signal flare to signal to him that his landing gear was down and it was safe to land, which he did without any further incident. Again, a great testament to his flying skills, presence of mind, and also the tough build of the now long since retired Phantom aircraft design. However, the story is not over.

By the time his jet came to a stop at the (now former) crash netting end of the runway, a military police Land Rover with suitably uniformed policemen was waiting to pick him up. He was taken directly to the station commander's residence and given a choice. Fly home the next day as a civilian, or under arrest and be taken to the British Military Prison at R.A.F Debden to await courts Martial. I always wondered what he did in "Civvy" life.

The runway was closed for only about a day, but with amazing efficiency, was up and running again within 24 hours. The aircraft that flew him into early retirement took off from it. What bittersweet memories he must have had as the aircraft took off and flew him over the now-replaced barriers!

As for me, I could have lived on free beer for weeks off my eye witness recount, but there was the unspoken rule of "don't talk". Fair enough. This is the first time I have written or even really spoken outside the family about it, but 43 years have gone by and the station was decommissioned 30 years ago so I reckon the security risks have all but gone.

As a footnote. The pilot's fate had already been decided on by the station commander as, whilst he was being driven to the COs residence for his moment of reckoning, my other mate, the station's duty admin clerk, was typing out the station commanders letter of acceptance of the guy's resignation and preparing his discharge papers. Don't know about today but, back then, the military could move pretty quickly when needed.

 

[Howard70]

...in Texas, where a lot of military flight training occurs, you may have noticed, there have been no new power lines added for decades.

Seems relevant given the last week!

Howard

 

[Spectre22]

View attachment 124046

It'll buff out.

Safety wire and a little duct tape, it’s a go!

 

[jaybee2786]

French military jets cut off village's power supply by flying low

The two Rafale aircraft hit electrical lines on a low-altitude training flight in the south.

www.bbc.co.uk

I wouldn't fancy being those pilots in front of their CO.

I'm ex raf and had on occasions had a left hand seat on Puma .and when in that seat my job was to keep An eye out for power cables and birds the feather kind.very easy for any kind of aircraft manned or not to hit power cables more so military as they fly so low just take a look on youtube at the mach loop

 

[Cymru]

Worth remembering the RAF are currently banned from Mach Loop for flying *too low* (amongst other things) because the video ended up on Twitter.

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[jaybee2786]

French military jets cut off village's power supply by flying low

The two Rafale aircraft hit electrical lines on a low-altitude training flight in the south.

www.bbc.co.uk

I wouldn't fancy being those pilots in front of their CO.

I'm ex raf and had on occasions had a left hand seat on Puma .and when in that seat my job was to keep An eye out for power cables and birds the feather kind.very easy for any kind of aircraft manned or not to hit power cables more so military as they fly so low just take a look on youtube at the mach loop

I'm ex raf and had on occasions had a left hand seat on Puma .and when in that seat my job was to keep An eye out for power cables and birds the feather kind.very easy for any kind of aircraft manned or not to hit power cables more so military as they fly so low just take a look on youtube at the mach loop

Ps my job was to shoot down jets flying at mach II

 

[jaybee2786]

this is when low level flying becomes a problem the lynx skid is tapping me on the top of my head falklands 1983

 

[Crouching Leopard]

I'm ex raf and had on occasions had a left hand seat on Puma .and when in that seat my job was to keep An eye out for power cables and birds the feather kind.very easy for any kind of aircraft manned or not to hit power cables more so military as they fly so low just take a look on youtube at the mach loop

Ps my job was to shoot down jets flying at mach II

So was mine. An early video of the system I worked on back in the late 70s early 80s. This shows the Mk1 Bloodhound, the Mk11 was faster and had longer target acquisition and tracking range as well as a more powerful warhead. It was also capable of carrying a nuclear fusion suppression warhead (it could pepper the nuke inside the attacker with potassium and so reduce the risk of nuclear fusion taking place on bloodhound missile impact), but these were never used. We used to train everyday targeting aircraft, simulating takedowns, and preparing for something you hoped would never happen. Ahhh, those were the days.

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This test used drones, but they were slightly bigger than the ones we fly today.

Maybe thats why, when I see another drone flying near me, I have this strong urge to "acquire" the target in my screen and aim straight for it ?


Don't know what this has to do with our modern drones, but this thread has been great fun to read.