Originally Posted by
Idle Reverse
I think we may be a little out with some of the dates on this one. The pilot in the “harness accident” was Flt Lt Ian Redwood. Ian came through the CFS Bulldog course as a student QFI in the summer of 84 at Scampton. I flew with him on the course. The accident happened the following year in Mar 85. Generally speaking the chute stayed / lived in the aircraft seat. You walked out to the aircraft and the chute was already in the seat waiting for you. Prior to the accident, the parachute procedure after normal shutdown was to unstrap in the cockpit and leave the chute in the aircraft seat prior to vacating the aircraft. The chute harness was the higher of the two boxes and was realeased first, followed by the lower seat harness.
Evidence from the accident suggested Ian may have inadvertently released the chute harness before jumping from the spinning aircraft (albeit he may have hastily attempted to resecure the chute harness). Reflecting on this the white coated behavioural boffins decided we Pilots needed to “make it normal” to leave the aircraft with our chute still attached to us and so the norm / SOP was changed so that after shut down the crew would simply release the seat harness, vacate the aircraft with parachute still attached, and after jumping / stepping off the wing (ie feet now on the ground) to then release the chute harness and take the chute off. Having completed this “normal behavioural pattern” the crew would then step back onto the wing and return the chute to the cockpit seat. So my point is that the change came then in the summer of 85, after Ian’s accident. I left the waterfront and the Bulldog world in the following summer of 86 but I would have expected the revised SOP for the chutes might have been in force throughout its remaining service life; though the thread (albeit thread drift) on here might suggest otherwise ?
Happy days.
I joined my UAS in the winter of 1985, so this accident was very topical and fresh in people's minds, and the logic to exit while wearing the parachute seemed totally sensible. Sadly my best friend (APO Mark Davies) died a few years later (March 1988) when the off duty fireman first responder was unable to fathom how to release the two harness boxes and Mark was semi-conscious. He ran to get a belt cutter from his car but by the time he returned the aircraft had lit up:
http://www.ukserials.com/pdflosses/m...0302_xx712.pdf