Hello John,
I was tempted to mail you personally as I think myself lucky to count you as a colleague & friend, but thought I'd take a leaf out of your book again and stand up front - I'm sure you know all this.
For the benefit of others;
When Lt.Cdr.Taylor Scott, A Fleet Air Arm Test Pilot at Dunsfold, ( where Harriers of all UK types were assembled and test flown, along with development work on the Hawk and Harrier ) took an early GR5 - ZD325 - for a routine test flight, it ended badly.
After no response to Air Traffic the Harrier was eventually visually contacted by a nearby Galaxy, and photographed with the seat still in, but no pilot; the aircraft was heading West either by trim or autopilot.
It eventually ran out of fuel and went down relatively gently in the Southern Irish Sea, 12,000' down - as deep as the Titanic.
There followed an extensive search all along the flightpath, with some false alarms of seat rockets ( which couldn't be right ).
Taylor's body was found near Winchester; it became apparent quite early in the BOI ( I was photographer on it ) that the drogue chute had fired, and dragged him straight through the canopy, breaking an arm, and he was quite possibly dragged for a short time before the chute shredded.
I have been in contact with his family several times, who were a lot more up-front than I was prepared to be, so they will hopefully not be surprised when I say the evidence indicated Taylor was fighting the shredded 'chute ( the temperature probe on the fin was thought to be the culprit for the chute damage ) all the way with his one good arm.
There were various theories as to what caused the drogue to fire;
Personally I think the barostatic unit was involved, as Taylor was at 35.000' doing pressurisation checks.
Some think he was hypoxic due to a malfunction on the then new OBOGS onboard oxygen generating system, and grabbed the wrong seat lever - manual separation, which would have fired the drogue as described.
Snag is, on the Mk 12 seat for this to happen there's an interlock, one must first have tried the main ejection handle or the manual separation won't act.
It was found on inspection that many of these interlocks didn't work; hence my comment about MB.
The official theory was that as Taylor was flying into the setting sun, he motored the seat down and the drogue initiation hit a 'wander-lamp' fallen from the aft cockpit bulkhead; I photographed that being tried repeatedly, out of 40 tries, 39 times the seat sprang around it, once it contacted the drogue firing mechanism.
Put it this way; all my photogaraphs of the ( 47 I think ) of modifications made to seat and aircraft were siezed by the new manager after JF left, and unknown to me at the time BAe put up teams of highly paid lawyers against his widow.
After 5 years of bitter battle ( which I wish I'd known about ) - she won.
She collapsed in the court when she heard his last words to the groundcrew ( I had seen ZD325 being towed out that evening as I drove home, one of the first green camouflage GR5's, and thought to myself how good it looked ) - Taylor remarked " What a lovely evening ".
Last edited by Double Zero; 28th Jul 2010 at 19:16.