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.
Just as I recall the events. And certainly the procedure in place in 88 when I left the Bulldog. Can’t swear to the procedure in 89.
Indeed, following the change, I logged a practice abandonment drill every time I flew since standard egress mirrored the actions I would take if I needed to abandon.