Originally Posted by
ASRAAMTOO
interesting piece of work. Would you also be able to very accurately determine the elapsed time between your 720 and 280 ft points. This will give an ROD.
Just proves how deceptive videos can be to the naked eye. They looked higher.
I was actually surprised that it was that high, based on the scenario of total power loss at the point of pitch up.
I use something called Adobe Premiere Pro as a video editor. It's timeline is measured in thousands of a second. I will see if I can capture the exact time of the knife edge at the top and the frame I used to determine the eject height. The poster above, the ex BA and military guy, is right on it being an average speed and that may be useful to at least give an idea that it was greater than that.
I don't know if there is consensus about what was going on aerodynamically to start the descent. I seems to most that it was a stall in the bank and a spin. Stopped after one rotation to wings level and the nose pitched up. Pitched up by how much? And by what force, pilot, or the natural rising of the nose in the incipient portion of a spin before it goes flat. If a Tutor flat spins when fully developed. I'd venture to say Capt. MacDougall did get the spin stopped, but the aircraft was not vertical at that point and seemed to be under some sort of control. You can see that after the eject, the aircraft pitched down and was not spinning. In the period before the eject, and immediately after, the aircraft is very nose down and there is the appearance and likely the reality of a high rate of descent. The ROD may have been less at the moment of eject.
I'm normally on the side that says speculation on the cause of crashes is good because most of us are civilian pilots and any unanswered questions after a crash are often questions we would have on our mind the next day when we go flying in a similar type or situation. That doesn't hold with military accidents. So, I tend to want to hear the ex military guys give their inputs. I've put in this wee analysis of heights to add that small bit. Captain Mac Dougall has thankfully survived, and whatever we might think, he surely knows what happened and in time we will all know.
I'll see if I can come up with that average ROD.