Posted on 01/11/2022 10:04:23 PM PST by blueplum
Taiwanese rescuers on Wednesday located the wreckage of a F-16V jet that crashed into the sea a day before, less than two months after the island launched the first squadron of its most advanced fighters.
The jet disappeared from radar screens around half an hour after taking off for a routine training mission from its base in southwestern Taiwan on Tuesday....
....The incident has dealt a blow to the new squadron of US-made F-16Vs that was commissioned in November as Taiwan upgraded its ageing fleet amid rising tensions with China.
The airforce has temporarily grounded its entire F16 fleet.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Hmmm. Extremely low altitude? The -16s glide ratio is sufficient to allow time for making decisions. Catastrophic failure not attributed to pilot error seems unlikely.
Isn’t that a fully fly-by-wire aircraft though? Without power to run the computer-control systems agile fighters (designed to be inherently unstable) are uncontrollable and the pilot’s only option is to eject.
Quadruple redundancy for powering the flight controls so I don’t know if there has ever been a case where someone had to eject because the flight control systems lost power.
I know of many many cases, unfortunately, where pilots gloc’d at an altitude too low to recover, or became disoriented and flew into the ground (or water).
Bird strike, engine failure, spatial disorientation, who knows? What was the weather like at the time. I’m guessing he just flew into the sea. It’s happened before. The CSFDR will tell the story.
“The -16s glide ratio is sufficient to allow time for making decisions.”
Low altitude and low air speed changes that quickly. 0 air speed = 0 glide ratio.
You need no altitude to eject from an F-16. You can eject from ground level via its rocket assisted ejection seat.
1. Catastrophic in flight failure?
2. Spatial disorientation and flew into the sea?
3. Erroneous flight information displayed on the panel due to computer failure?
That pilot went down with the aircraft.
.
Shot down?🤔
I think it has a 16:1 glide ratio. At altitude, without power, there ought to be time to get out. Bird strike was something that occurred to me. There are plenty in a marine environment. A good sized bird slamming into the canopy can raise hell.
When I was in the AF, I heard that the joystick for the -16s fly-by-wire was designed by the TAC Commander, General Robert Creech. I was told that the original design had to be loosened up so that other people could fly the jet. Doing work in F-4 cockpits, you felt like you were in a boat. The stick and pedals were where you’d expect them, and there were rear-view mirrors everywhere. The F-16 was completely different; it was more like being reclined on top of and in front of the jet, with a panoramic view through the canopy. The stick was no more than a joystick...like the one that controlled much of the fire-control system in the -4. I don’t know what the pilot in question had flown before the -16, but it was probably quite different. I assume he was with at least one other jet when he was flying. Hope we get follow-up on this one.
Pretty impressive for a jet fighter. I would have expected that it would have been single digits.
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