Originally Posted by
Tashengurt
I wonder if the two dots of light that shoot off after the second impact at about 0:43 are the crew banging out?
I’d say almost certainly yes. If you step through frame-by-frame you can actually see 5 bright spots leave the aircraft very quickly around that point. The first 3 all flare up brightly, accelerate away from the aircraft and fade quickly to leave a faint trail. I reckon these are the canopy jettison rockets and then the 2 seat rockets leaving in the command ejection sequence. Then there are 2 bright spots which don’t flare up, accelerate or fade, but drift away from the falling aircraft. I’d be guessing what these are; hot debris associated with ejection seat function seems a reasonable possibility.
I also don’t think this was after a ‘second’ impact. The first event at 0:15 looks to me like 3 flares being dispensed. These appear to seduce the green tracking box on the screen before it then jumps back to the aircraft (very advanced camera for a rag-tag bunch of rebels
- it also recovers to track the falling aircraft after initially being seduced by the explosion) and notably they seem to be deployed at roughly the same time as the SAM would have been launched, which makes me wonder if they were deployed automatically by a system detecting it. It seems unlikely to me that the crew had much/any awareness as they would presumably have deployed more flares and/or manoeuvred.