Originally Posted by
gums
Salute!
The Bee has an auto eject feature when in the last of the landing modes.
Apparently the USMC and maybe the RN Harrier folks wanted this. Seems the plane could roll rather sharply if certain things failed, and the installed system was quicker than the pilot.
Guess we wait for a report from USMC, and it might be a long time.......
And BTW, even the primitive FBW jet I flew 40 years ago would fly at last commanded/trimmed roll rate and gee following ejection unless completely outta control. So early motor failure crashes and controlled ejections were typified by descriptions of the jet flying ahead until reaching the AoA limiter, then descending until impact. One even landed slightly ahead of the pilot, broke one gear but was in fairly good shape. And the Thunderbird a coupla years back has a good pic of the plane that "landed" short of the rwy at Pete Field. Didn't burn and had only a few hundred pounds of gas left. Was throttle linkage failure and engine shut down when he retarded the throttle - "power lever angle" in some manuals, heh heh.
Gums sends...
Gums, great to see you back here.
The auto eject feature on the Bee is there to ensure safe ejection when a certain set of parameters are met during STOVL. An auto ejection in any other condition would I guess result in an immediate fleet grounding, as well as being the first time auto eject is used operationally!