Jet pilot ejects in Afghanistan

Jet pilot ejects in Afghanistan

news.bbc.co.uk

A British jet pilot has been injured after ejecting from his aircraft before it crashed in Afghanistan.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Once again a Harrier hit's the ground, not an uncommon occurrence it seems. It would be interesting to know how many are left in the current fleet. About 5 must have gone down in the last two years minimum. Anyway, Thankfully the pilot made it out ok.

Just a matter of time before the next one...

news.bbc.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Are they not very good, or something. Is this a normal fatallaty rate for air planes in the raf?

The Harrier is a complicated and difficult aircraft to fly, it's unique and there will never be another aircraft like it... future VTOL aircraft seem to be taking different directions in the design... You gotta take into account when this thing was developed - back in the 50's I believe.

But if this incident is undercarage failure that happens to all aircraft some times, don't go screaming that Harriers are unsafe just yet... We got nothing that can really replace them... I think we were looking at the V-22 but thats a different bird entirely, maybe we will buy some F-35's or JSF's or which ever does the vertical thing.

Give the Harrier it's due it WAS a very good multirole aircraft , but its ageing too quickly considering the combat zones that are around these days, Too many wars and not enough armies.
Harriers crash so do the best of aircraft even the totally brand new fresh off the production line one.
The trouble is not with the aircraft but the servicing that goes with it, the service engineers are told to get the aircraft flying as quick as possible. Sometimes cutting corners to get the job done, sometimes they overlook a problem , it could've been stress fatigue in a engine part, or part of the airframe, something as simple as a blown fuse.
Anything can happen, to fully check an aircraft you must totally dismantle it and analyse every single part, no engineer wants to do that or has the time to do so.
Even the most beautifully maintained aircraft , even from the begining of the flyng age, mercilessly maintained, cherished even, can fall from the skies, any aircraft is a loss considering the money spent on it over its years, loss of the pilot only adds to the story and makes it even worse.
Pot luck every time an aircraft takes off as to whether or not it'll land again in one piece or as it was designed to.
Luckily for the pilot he was only slightly injured over a friendly airbase and not either killed in the crash or captured by enemy forces.

See not enough info to come to anything but a speculation!

It could have been piolet error?
Bad servicing?
Metal fatigue?
Some mechanical or electrical failure?
Could have taken small arms fire?
Even possible it took an indirect hit from a Russia made personnel anti air rocket?

Too many things that could have gone wrong, not enough info to start criticising the plane as the sole reason. Sure many have failed in recent history, but what is to say each one is not realted to low hovering over combat zones? Small arms fire is a number one suspect if they been hovering over Taliban stronghold areas to gather intel etc...

Originally posted by Now_Then
The Harrier is a complicated and difficult aircraft to fly, it's unique and there will never be another aircraft like it... future VTOL aircraft seem to be taking different directions in the design... You gotta take into account when this thing was developed - back in the 50's I believe.

But if this incident is undercarage failure that happens to all aircraft some times, don't go screaming that Harriers are unsafe just yet... We got nothing that can really replace them... I think we were looking at the V-22 but thats a different bird entirely, maybe we will buy some F-35's or JSF's or which ever does the vertical thing.

It can't be that complicated to fly.

Arnold Schwarzanagger(sp?) made it look very easy in his movie True Lies.