r/PraiseTheCameraMan • u/xenreh • 23d 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 23d 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 23d ago
It looked like it landed very goddamn close to the buildings to me
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u/Disgruntled_Welshman 22d ago
Yep, and all of wales is cleared to fly these missons not just Anglesey. Fun
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u/Harpsichordist68 23d 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 23d ago
How can you hear the birds but not the explosion? Just wondering
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u/EEVVEERRYYOONNEE 23d ago edited 23d ago
You can hear it about 4 seconds after the impact but it's very subtle.
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u/froseva 23d ago
-We need to eject! -But the plane will crash into the school! -It doesn't matter...
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u/ThisIsYourMormont 23d 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-26
23d ago
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u/Charlie3PO 23d 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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23d ago
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u/Charlie3PO 23d 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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23d ago
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u/Charlie3PO 23d 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 23d 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/ThisIsYourMormont 23d 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 23d 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 23d 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/BoleroMuyPicante 9d ago
If there's nothing you can do to mitigate then why not eject? You can't control where it lands even if you ride it into the ground.
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u/Dugoutcanoe1945 9d ago
I was referring to ‘controlled’ landings like in a civilian aircraft into a roadway. I apologize if I was not clear.
I can’t think of an argument against ejecting from a military aircraft after the pilot has done all they can do and it’s out of their control. Thanks for allowing me to clarify!
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u/BoleroMuyPicante 9d ago
A big commercial carrier landing on a highway is an interesting thought experiment. There's a high likelihood of hitting and killing motorists on the road, but depending on the size of the plane and number of passengers you might save more lives on the plane than you take on the road. Real life trolley problem.
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u/jdogg40k 23d ago
Holy shit! I hope nobody got killed.
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u/xenreh 23d 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 23d 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 23d ago
hopefully no one on the ground was hurt? Does anyone know? Looks like a populated area unfortunately…
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u/IndustrialPuppetTwo 23d ago
They ejected right over a town?
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u/JackCooper_7274 22d 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 23d 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 23d 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 23d ago edited 23d 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/RoninRobot 23d 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.