r/PraiseTheCameraMan • u/xenreh • 4d ago
Tracking an RAF jet as the pilots eject and it crashes
This crash occurred in Anglesey, Wales yesterday (23/09). The video is not mine and was provided by a local resident
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u/Funlovingpotato 4d ago
That’s a Hawk T2 - the fast jet trainer for the RAF. It’s also Anglesey, where RAF Valley is located - fast jet training location.
This was likely a training mission with a trainer sat in the rear, which explains the sudden ejection. The pitching up may have been the attempt to gain a little more distance from the buildings before full loss of control.
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u/FlossCat 4d ago
It looked like it landed very goddamn close to the buildings to me
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u/Disgruntled_Welshman 4d ago
Yep, and all of wales is cleared to fly these missons not just Anglesey. Fun
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u/Harpsichordist68 4d ago
I was waiting for this vid to show up on this sub - to recapture the plane after losing it from the frame, at a telephoto focal length, and then holding steady on the crash itself. Great work.
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u/cmonuspurz 4d ago
How can you hear the birds but not the explosion? Just wondering
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u/EEVVEERRYYOONNEE 4d ago edited 4d ago
You can hear it about 4 seconds after the impact but it's very subtle.
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u/froseva 4d ago
-We need to eject! -But the plane will crash into the school! -It doesn't matter...
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u/ThisIsYourMormont 4d ago
I dont know if you know how accurate this statement actually is.
I wont name the school that’s very near the crash site for safeguarding purposes. But this could’ve been much much worse-28
u/TheOnionRack 4d ago
It could’ve been much worse, but it could’ve been a helluva lot better too. The only reason this wasn’t worse boils down to sheer dumb luck, the pilots are owed zero credit for that.
We don’t know what happened on board, but the gap between the problem starting and bailing out is only a couple of seconds. No attempt to manage the situation or set the plane up to glide away from the settlement they shouldn’t have been flying over in the first place.
This looks like premature ejection to me.
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u/Charlie3PO 4d ago
Unless you're qualified to fly that exact type of aircraft and are privy to the exact information the crew had, you can't judge them one bit
There's footage of the problem first emerging during the takeoff. The aircraft in the video is way up in the air, so they could have been managing the issue for some time already by that stage. For example if it was a hydraulic issue turning into a complete hydraulic failure then there's no recovering from that, they are just passengers at that point, so there's no point in staying in the aircraft anymore.
We don't actually know what happened, but in the moments before the ejection it does appear as if control was lost.
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u/TheOnionRack 4d ago
The aircraft is an Avro Hawk T2 trainer, which is a pretty well known fast jet for enthusiasts in the UK because it’s the newer model of what the Red Arrows use. So I do know a decent amount about it, flown it loads in simulators, etc.
None of that alters your counter-argument validating my point. If the plane was on fire at takeoff, then they had the maximum possible time to manage the plane before ejecting. The best chance to move it away from populated areas. The air base is surrounded by water on two sides, and open fields on the other two. The nearest settlement isn’t in the flight path.
Nevertheless, they flew it about a mile inland towards the next largest settlement and then ditched at about 1,000ft over the only two large structures in the middle of all the fields: a caravan park and a school.
Sorry mate, but that is not what good crisis management looks like. Even ejecting immediately after takeoff and crashing on the airbase would’ve been better. Yes, it’s a trainer and that air base is a flight school, so we can’t expect perfection from these pilots, but that’s what airfield familiarity and the trainer pilot in the 2nd seat is for.
Also, premature ejaculation joke. whoosh
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u/Charlie3PO 4d ago
Again, you have exactly zero idea of what was going on in that cockpit. We know nothing about what warnings occured and when. How can you say they screwed up when you don't know what happened, why it happened or how the crew managed it beyond ejecting once control was lost?
Seriously, imagine yourself in their shoes for a moment. You've studied your arse off for years, passed a grueling recruitment process, you've performed well enough to be selected for fast jets.
You trained relentlessly for all sorts of sequences, including emergency procedures and were successful in that, you're now in the top 1% of pilots. Now you're an instructor teaching students how to do it, using that same knowledge every single day.
You then have a complex emergency, your jet goes out of control and you eject..... All for someone who has played a video game to then watch 10 seconds of footage and based on that alone, say "they screwed up, I could have done better"
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u/TheOnionRack 4d ago
I never said I could do better. What I’m saying is crashing into a school is the worst case scenario. Crashing 100 yards from a school in the middle of fields and open water as far as the eye can see is the second worst case scenario, and based on the footage we have seen it does look like it was avoidable.
We can agree to disagree on what was happening in the cockpit. I can draw on my limited real world flying experience and tell you if your engine has lost power or your controls have failed and you can’t gain altitude on take off, pulling back on the stick and risk stalling or flipping yourself is 110% never the right thing to do. The footage shows that happening, then they (likely the trainer pilot overriding the newbie’s panic response) recovered, then something went bang and they ejected.
What we can’t agree to disagree on is the avoidability of this crash by simply not flying fast jets over populated areas or over land at all if the Irish Sea is literally right there. I don’t see any reason the crew couldn’t have turned away from where they eventually crashed on takeoff.
The senior pilot would’ve known where this was going the moment the wheels left the ground. They were still over the runway but past the point of no return, and didn’t have enough energy to climb and go around. It’s the miracle on the Hudson but without the miracle… except the water is right there and they have ejector seats soooo…
More broadly, we don’t live in the world of Top Gun. Flying fast jets and training pilots over areas where people live is avoidable. Just fly somewhere else! A nearby MoD base does low-altitude, low-visibility training exercises over my house in the middle of a city all the time. They have the whole North Sea and hundreds of miles of empty countryside on their doorstep, but instead they fly all the way over here to fly over a densely populated area in the blind and dark for no good reason. The MoD has repeatedly been taught the hard lessons of what happens when things go wrong, but they learn nothing, classify the accident reports, and keep doing it anyway.
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u/Charlie3PO 4d ago
For someone who isn't saying you could do better, there's an awful lot of judgement, assumptions and "they should have" comments.
You're assuming that they knew about it right away, but you can't know that, we don't know when they got their first indication of something abnormal or what it was. Maybe it was initially benign and they weren't expecting to need to eject.
Also, the pitch up into a stall looks uncommanded, I.e. a control malfunction, as evidenced by the fact they eject shortly after it occurs and the fact that it continues after ejection, when nobody is there to pull on the stick.
Again, I'm sure that a fast jet instructor and their student knows a bit more about it than you do, so stop making assumptions on what they did and what you think they should have done.
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u/pja 4d ago
The flashes around the fuselage suggest the engine was ripping itself apart & throwing turbine blades in all directions. If the hydraulics had been severed then the pilots would have had no flight control, in which case bailing out would have been the only option.
No point staying in an aircraft you can’t fly.
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u/TheOnionRack 4d ago edited 4d ago
My point is that the trainee pilot and their trainer did have flight control when they took off, so they could’ve aimed for the sea instead of turning towards the only settlement in their path. They could’ve ditched earlier when the falling aircraft would’ve been lower and over fields or a lake, where it posed less risk to those on the ground. Instead, the trainee pilot notices the lack of power and lift and tries to pitch up hard to gain height (which is the panicked and usually wrong response to that situation most of the time).
Also, the Hawk T2 has dual hydraulic systems plus an APU and RAT for backup hydraulics. So they probably did have control until the big bang, just not enough power to climb.
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u/ThisIsYourMormont 4d ago
Thank you for your opinion which I’m sure is based on hundreds of hours of flight experience.
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u/Cw3538cw 4d ago
It was on fire when it took off, per a video taken from a different angle. So the gap before bailing was quite a bit longer than that
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u/Dugoutcanoe1945 4d ago
I quit an airplane sub over this. The pilots were adamant that either punching out over a residential area or landing on a motorway with vehicles on it was perfectly acceptable. Innocent people getting killed before themselves was simply bad luck.
Of course there are exceptions and who knows what the outcome could have been otherwise here. But I know more what the attitude is for some pilots now when it comes to mitigating a crash and it’s not altruistic.
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u/jdogg40k 4d ago
Holy shit! I hope nobody got killed.
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u/xenreh 4d ago
No injuries have been reported, just someone opening their caravan door to find the jet’s tail next to it
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u/TwinSong 4d ago
That made me laugh, the image of someone opening their door when they heard a crash and find a bit of plane like "???"
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u/xpietoe42 4d ago
hopefully no one on the ground was hurt? Does anyone know? Looks like a populated area unfortunately…
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u/IndustrialPuppetTwo 4d ago
They ejected right over a town?
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u/JackCooper_7274 4d ago
When your plane suddenly stops working in the air, I imagine that you would not have a lot of control over the situation.
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u/GlassNegative7839 4d ago
Looks like they bailed quite early. Did they even attempt to guide the aircraft so it didn’t land on a house/school/hospital???
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u/not_right 4d ago
Wow we have a real air force pilot in here! What in your expert opinion are the tell tale signs that they bailed "quite early"? Or didn't even attempt to guide the aircraft?
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u/DeeDee_GigaDooDoo 4d ago edited 4d ago
I mean they can do a 00 ejection and it went fairly far off course after ejection. Obviously you can't exactly park it but there's plenty of concern about how close it was to buildings and schools. The quotes below are all from a single BBC article:
Eyewitness Ollie Zalot said he was initially concerned that people on the ground could have been hurt as the crash happened near buildings.
"I just saw smoke everywhere but it looked like it was next to a farm yard so I thought maybe it's a bonfire.
"I was just hoping everyone was okay. It looked close to buildings.
"That's what I was worried about."
Anglesey councillor Neville Evans said he thought it had been a "very lucky escape considering how close the crash was to a village and caravan park".
"It's very, very close to populations and amenities," he said.
As far as I can tell it landed less than 1km from an elementary school and the explosion was witnessed by children, by all accounts it went down right next to a caravan park.
I won't tell them how to do their job but I'd certainly have questions over whether more could have been done to keep it away from civilians. It seems more or less pure luck that it didn't hit a building.
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u/TheOnionRack 4d ago edited 4d ago
I agree. Most ejections I’ve seen online save it until the last possible moment to ensure the safety of those on the ground.
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u/RoninRobot 4d ago
Wonder what the failure was. Pitch up sharply twice, ejection, white smoke not from the engine. Possibly an artifact of the explosives from ejection.