Ive not had a chance to read it fully and in depth however consider this
descion made to eject
pull bottom handle – Seat fails to fire
Pull Handle again – Seat fails to fire
try Top handle – Seat Fails to fire
canopy still attached – Seat wont fire – First action pull emergency jettison located between seats painted black and yellow
If no Joy open canopy with normal handle
Canopy leaves aircraft – seat fires
That’s what should have happened but ( I stand to be corrected)
THe accident report doesn’t highlight this VERY important procedure
True, but think about it from inside the cockpit.
It does mention it. It mentions it would have been impossible for pilot to open the canopy manually.
What it doesn’t do is go into detail as to why.
Well
1) No services pressure left for the canopy, more than likely why port gear also failed to extend just before hand.
2) Canopy was partially open, with s/b lock dissengaged and s/b canopy sill ejected into the airflow,
(confirmed by the level of wind noise in the ATC transmission) while port side was still firmly locked in place.
With the canopy twisted like that, and low pressure applying upward tension to the port lock hook (transmitted down the lever rods to the handle too), there’s no way he would have had the grunt to pull up the canopy locking handle, it would have been jammed solid!
3) He ran out of time to even try. see the tramsmission time line, there was no time between his “egress failure” transmission and the impact, to try anything meaningful.
What it does unfortunately highlight is, if Dave Stock had followed SOP and immediately climbed to at least 5-10k upon the double HYD warning, he might have had more time to try and get the canopy off. He had a few minutes after the AWP warnings before controls stiffening and a further few minutes before losing the controls completely. I can certainly understand his desire to try and save the aiframe though, given the fact that he probably had no idea that he had an advanced reheat fire when the warnings came up. I suspect even with 3-4 minutes at altitude, once he pulled the bang handle and the egress worked one side only, his fate was sealed, since the canopy would have been jammed. No amount of human grunt on a twisted canopy would have released that port hook IMO.
He may have had a slim chance, where he’d had time and altitude to pull the canopy jack release handle, which releases the hinge pins and jack end fittings.
The low pressure may have then lifted the aft end of the canopy up enough to rip it off of the forward lock spigot. Chances are he wouldn’t have cleared the canopy when the seat then went off though.
Unfortunately no wreckage of the handles, torque tube, release handle, hindges etc were left, it was all destroyed, so we will never know what he tried.
Its all easy in hindsight, but Im sure Dave stock had no idea why the canopy hadnt come off or how to fix it in such a short space of time
Long and short is that 451 should have been grounded the night before. No experienced Lightning crew in their right mind would have sent it off flying the following morning after the techincal issues it had that evening. Even a fast taxier would have been kiboshed after that.
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