Originally Posted by
Trim Stab
I'm feeling very sad for the young engineer's family, and also for the pilot whose injuries are unknown but possibly severe given the lack of news.
But I have a simple question. Why don't all Hawks have an inbuilt selector switch for command ejection - front/rear/both? This is simple binary logic, costing peanuts. Even before the Hawk was conceived, it must have been pencilled in as a Red Arrows aircraft so could potentially have had rear-seat passengers. It has been through multiple refits since birth. So how has this been overlooked?
You seem confident that it has been overlooked. What's that based on? You think it should be so, but isn't, so everyone else must be wrong?
Perhaps, just perhaps, after all the years of experience in the team, they decided that experienced people could be in charge of their own destiny?
Let's wait for the SI to tell us whether or not the sink rate was outside the seat limits anyway.
As for "costing peanuts", aye right.