The story, as what is publicly known as of now:
"Frankenhornet" (HN-468) left Patria's Halli airfield for a test flight to investigate aircraft behavior in "abnormal" flight modes followed by
an F/A-18C chase plane. The crew was a
very experienced test pilot (Captain) and a flight test-engineer (Lt.Col.) with thousands of flight hours on them.
The final planned manoeuvre of the flight was to climb vertically to about 33000 ft, throttle the engines back and recover from the resulting tail slide.
As the nose dropped, the plane entered into a vertical dive. When the plane was at approximately 7000 m. (~23000 ft.) in vertical dive, the chase plane pilot radioed: "Do you have control?", to which the HN-468 pilot replied "Negative, Negative".
When the HN-468 was at an altitude of about 4500 m. (15000 ft.) in high speed vertical dive, the chase plane pilot commanded "Eject! Eject!", at which point the pilot and test-engineer ejected at an estimated speed of over 500 kt.
In the violent ejection, both crrew suffered broken limbs (not just bruises), as the M/B ejection seat installed in F/A-18D does not have arm restraints. In addition, one of the crew lost his helmet in the ejection and suffered severe facial trauma.
The plane crashed on a rocky piece of land, next to a farm field and disintegrated into
very small fragments. The crew landed in a very thick forest, and even when they were located almost immediately after the crash, it took more than an hour to recover them in -22 C temperature. After recovery they were immediately transported to a hospital by a medevac helicopter, and surgically operated on thursday evening.
So, while the crew is "safe", they are not
exactly quite "sound", but they're expected to survive and fully recover, which is the most important thing.
Obviously, there's a
lot of speculation going on about possible causes to the loss of control, but I won't go into those...
The crash site is still being guarded by the military, citing danger of inhaling carbon-fibre fragments at the site, pretty much for the same
reason as when USN F/A-18 crashed at the approach of Miramar, San Diego last summer.
seppop