A Navy veteran pulled back the curtain on the “violent” experience airmen like the ones on the downed F-15E endure when ejecting from an aircraft — revealing the emergency maneuver includes little to no parachute training.
Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, a TOPGUN graduate and the president of the No Fallen Heroes Foundation, told The Post that the Air Force colonel and his pilot made “a pretty stark choice to either die or eject” last week when they were shot down over Iran.
Few would know better than Buckley, who piloted F-18 Hornets in 44 combat missions during two tours in Iraq.
“You’re always worried about the condition of the aviator and aircrew, if they had to eject, because ejecting is one of the most violent experiences a body can go through,” Buckley explained, noting that no human is built to withstand “instantaneous 10 to 20 Gs of force.”
Buckley described the “rocket ride” combined with “500 miles an hour of wind blast” as a recipe for disaster if the ejector’s body isn’t in the perfect position.
If any of the occupant’s limbs are the slightest bit loose, they can sustain a flail injury that “might just” tear their arms out of their sockets, Buckley warned.
The seconds-long process requires a daunting level of precision, but Buckley said that the airmen “don’t train” for it.
“A lot of people think that, oh yeah, if you’re a fighter pilot, you must do some parachute training. Zero,” Buckley said.
He noted that there is such a thing as a “brutal” ejection seat trainer — but it pales in comparison to “the real thing.”
The Air Force colonel was seriously injured, but still managed to evade enemy forces while hiding in the Zagros Mountains for a day and a half until he was rescued on Easter Sunday.
While it’s not clear what kind of injuries he sustained, Buckley suggested he was likely banged up either during the whirlwind ejection or after landing on “pretty unforgiving-looking territory.”
Typically, he said, the compression from the ejection itself can cause things like spinal cord injuries. He noted that, in the early days of aerial combat, some soldiers would lose their legs or feet “because they got stuck on the canopy or on the rudder pedals” when the ejection was triggered.
So long as the majority of the airman’s body made it out of the plane, such ejections would be hailed as a triumph.
“The military defines a successful ejection as pilot pulls the ejection handle. Canopy fires, rocket fires, parachute opens. What didn’t I name? You live,” Buckley said.
“So the definition of a successful ejection to the military is all that stuff worked. What happened to the pilot is in God’s hands,” he added.
The heroic airman said “God is good” over the radio when he finally reached a hiding place in the Zargros Mountains — which almost tripped up President Trump, who speculated his prayer “sounded like something a Muslim would say.”
The colonel and his pilot, who was rescued just hours after their F-15E jet was shot down on Friday, are both in stable condition, Trump told reporters on Monday.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
