> Luxury British watchmakers Bremont are the founders of an interesting tradition. Alongside fellow Brits, aerospace company Martin-Baker, whose construction and supply of ejector seats dominate 70% of the global market, they co-design a signature special edition variant of Bremont’s MBII watch.
> Given their rich affinity with the aviation industry from day dot, Bremont’s aim was to over-engineer one of their timepieces in collaboration with Martin-Baker to withstand the incomprehensible forces felt by the human body when ejecting from an aircraft. These watches, known as MBI, would then be numerically engraved and awarded to any of Martin-Baker’s success stories.
Few watches would have the need to endure extreme temperature changes from -40 to 40 degrees Celsius, or rapid altitude pressures up to 100,000 feet, let alone atomic-level shock testing and prolonged salt water exposure. Bremont Founder Nick English says of the rationale behind the watch, “with the testing and development behind us, both Martin-Baker and Bremont felt that for those pilots who have successfully ejected from a fighter aircraft (it really is a special and elite club), a bespoke and equally special watch would commemorate this well.”
> …to withstand the incomprehensible forces felt by the human body when ejecting from an aircraft…
Whatever floats their goat but there is nothing incomprehensible about the forces experienced during an ejection.
The accelerations are rougly on the order of ~10G. Roughly the same as a car crash. Not something you want to experience, but far from incomprehensible.
Large animals are pretty flimsy. If a human can survive something reliably it shouldn't be hard to build a wristwatch that can do it all day every day.
Collectively, we just asserted that "ejecting from an airplane is similar to falling on the ground from 6 feet". This doesn't sound right. Surely pilots who eject go through harder stuff than falling on the ground.
There's a big difference between something hard like a watch falling on a hard surface, to this happening to a human. We have a lot of padding that distributes the force. A watch does not so the G-force is shorter and sharper.
A 6-foot fall is nothing to laugh at by the way. I think it might be similar in terms of G-force, just momentarily while an ejection seat will have a longer boost duration.
Additional quote from the article: “People will tell you that you don’t generally eject when you think you’re going to die, you eject only when you know you’re gonna die.”
I went to that museum (U.S.A.F. museum in Dayton, OH). If you like warplanes, I highly recommend it. It's an incredible value for your money, and you get to be up close and personal with tons of amazing planes (SR-71, YF-23, B-52, etc.) You definitely want to give yourself two days.
And you would be right. The starfighter was widely deployed in Western Germany and had a terrible safety record (>100 pilots and >200 planes lost out of 900). I recall it widely being discussed in the media when I was young and the plane was called the widowmaker for that reason.
Iy was, a common joke was that if you wanted a Starfighter all you had to do was to buy an acre of land and wait for a while...
Truth be told, the Starfighter was an interceptor, designed to carry air-to-air missiles fast towards approaching Soviet strategic bombers. That's it, nothing else. The German Airforce wanted a multi-role fighter, some creative Lockheed marketing assured the the Starfighter was bought in the F-104G variant. At that G-variant turned it into a brick to fly, stall speeds close to minimum take off speeds among other things.
The starfighter's safety record with other operators was a lot better.
There is a reason Franz-Josef Strauss became as rich as he did being a "mere" minister and state prime minister. He never got caught so... In the end his insistence on a multirole fighter and the fighter being the F-104G (already almost oboslete at the time) killed a lot of pilots. Great example to show the cost of corruption.
Don't mention that in Bavaria though, or you risk being driven out of town. He's still a legend here, especially for the ruling party (CSU) of this virtual one-party state. The Munich airport is named after him, and AFAIK the current state prime minister still has a bust of him on his desk.
> He's still a legend here, especially for the ruling party (CSU) of this virtual one-party state.
The CSU, thank God, hasn't been ruling alone since 2018 and it is highly unlikely that they will ever be able to do so again. They will be in government for a long time though, mostly because the SPD in Bavaria is an ongoing clusterfuck and won't rise high enough to form a red-green coalition.
> The Munich airport is named after him, and AFAIK the current state prime minister still has a bust of him on his desk.
It's even worse. When normal young people had posters of semi-naked stars and starlets, Söder's bed was adorned by a FJS poster [1].
Oh yeah, the CSU woreships this guy... And after all certain CSU poloticians, including, allegedly, Strauss own daughter, did during the pandemic with mask deliveries, the CSU really learned well from him.
You don't get driven from town so for calling him out anymore. That moved to villages a while ago, otherwise I would have had some serious issues back at school.
Let's see... they already had a coalition government once (2008-20013) with the FDP, with the result that during the next elections the FDP lost so many votes that they weren't represented in the next parliament. Then they ruled alone for 5 more years, and since 2018 they have a coalition with the "Freie Wähler", which is a loose grouping of ex-CSU members. Let's see how well they will fare in the next elections. So far the only remarkable thing about them that the press reported is that their boss and now deputy prime minister Hubert Aiwanger is a vaccine skeptic...
Aiwanger is also a general weirdo, profited heavily from increased wood prices (he is after all a not to small farmer and owns considerably sized forests). I loved his comment about good Bavarians carrying a knife. Good thing about the FW is that the AfD has some serious, and arguably less critical, competition.
> Good thing about the FW is that the AfD has some serious, and arguably less critical, competition.
I'd prefer the FDP to take up that role like they do in federal government. While I in no way like or support the populist bullshit that the FDP pulls (e.g. their questionable appeasement towards COVID deniers), they're at least somewhat grounded in democracy. The FW are dangerous because of their structure - grab up enough support locally to run under their banner and you can talk whatever shit you want, including cuddling up with the far right [1].
In Holland it also had a very bad name due to Lockheed's bribery of the royal family, which shouldn't even have had any influence on such matters anyway.
I know so little about this but aren’t fighters much more ballistic in order to be nimble? My loose amateur sense is that a fighter pilot is always flirting with their plane no-longer behaving like a plane and more like a guided missile if they flew it just the slightest wrong (or right?) way.
You're thinking of something different. Modern (computer-controlled) fighters are aerodynamically unstable because that makes them more manouverable, but that's about being able to turn or spin rather than flying balistically.
For traditionally-shaped planes (delta wings work differently) there's a fairly straightforward tradeoff between big wings to increase lift at low speeds and small wings to reduce drag at high speed. Flaps help but there's a limit to how much you can change the shape of a wing in flight. So if you build a plane to go very fast, you tend to end up with a plane that has a high minimum speed as well, which makes take off and especially landing difficult.
To simplify, are you basically saying that with more unstable wing configurations, at slower speeds the plane simply wants to fall out of the sky rather than glide? Is that sensible to imagine for this topic?
Stability is how the aircraft reacts to disturbances (control inputs, turbulence, ...). Stable aircraft resist disturbances and settle into going where they're pointed at a predictable speed, so you can let go of the controls and attend to other pilot things. Unstable aircraft, when disturbed, go more and more in the direction of the disturbance. (e.g. a turn gets tighter and tighter, nose oscillates up and down more and more, ...) You need to correct this with more control inputs, but these will also have unstable results. So they only let computers fly unstable aircraft.
A car has good stability in turns: it wants to go straight, if there's a bump or you jerk the wheel a bit it still goes straight. If you apply a control input and get a turn, it will let you maintain the turn but it also wants to unwind and go straight. This is stability but not aerodynamic stability.
The reason one might want a less-stable aircraft is that stability is the opposite of manoeuverability. Super-stable aircraft like training gliders really resist turning and can feel too much like hard work.
As another commenter mentioned the wings don't contribute much to stability. The two big fins at the back (the stabilizers) are the main source.
(disclaimer: I fly fixed-wing acft and gliders, barely, and am no physicist.)
Yeah, but first you have to get off the ground and gain some altitude! Jet engines don't really start developing power until they're moving forward fast (forcing more oxygen into the intake).
My dad said flying a jet out of Denver was always a challenge because the jet would just lumber along refusing to develop power. (Denver is at high altitude.) He'd always start the takeoff roll with the tail hanging over the edge of the runway start.
I suppose you could compare the Starfighter to the Gee-Bee as they are the same concept, but the Gee-Bee always looked like something out of a pulp magazine rather than a mean mo-fo.
I have always been attracted to fighter planes, the technologies developed and skills needed to fly them. These days I just wonder when the human being is going to stop building machines to inflict most possible damage to other human beings. Is 10000 years enough? I wish a universal wave of metanoia would cristalize on earth and all the might and magic of tje human would be use for a better purpose
I was going to post to say you must have quite a low opinion of the human race to suggest we maximize our destructive capabilities because we have no choice and can't do anything about it, but on reflection the opposite is true. At least if we have no choice in the matter and it's just "who we are" we can carry on without worrying about it too much.
Believing we could be peaceful but we choose not to be is far worse.
The need for destructive capabilities isn't inate to our 'design'. It's more fundamental than that. It comes from the fact that cooperation is unreliable, and the fact that sometimes 'the greater good' means individual sacrifices that individuals may not agree with.
If humans were a hive mind where cooperation was assured, you'd still need destructive capabilities against the environment, and perhaps other species.
That humans strive for the capacity of violence doesn't surprise or sadden me. What does sadden me is that much of our pinacle of technological development happens with the explicit goal of violent capacity. And the fact that rough parity in our violent capacity is generally the only thing keeping big states from expansion.
There is no more point being saddened by it, then there is being saddened by Bears having teeth.
A toothless bear is no better off being so, because those teeth are useful and necessary for it to be a bear and/or equivalent in it’s ecosystem. It’s a part of it’s success and it’s future. It is a part of what makes it a bear.
A bear that felt bad about having teeth though? That is one unfortunate bear.
A bear that tries to tear out it’s teeth? That is a bear that longs to not exist as a bear anymore (or at all), and the most unfortunate being of all.
If a bear happens to wish for a world where it's teeth weren't necessary, that is nice! But that doesn't much help that bear stay fed, survive the next winter, or reproduce.
To the immediate parent posters comment regarding being saddened by the extreme focus (and spend) on destructive capability globally among us humans - it is sad, if one cares to dwell on it. I see out ability to do it as a sign of our luxurious position - not having to worry about if we will be fed or starve to death, if we will survive the next winter, or our being able to reproduce.
Mostly due to that extreme obsession, the resulting tens of millions of (recent) dead bodies, and hundreds of millions more that did not end up dead because of them.
Maybe I'm in a bit of an existential mood today, eh?
I suggest you listen to the recent AI podcast episode with Martin Rees, he has some interesting different thoughts on the subject:
https://podcruncher.co/play/4Ivc
The ending about helicopters got me - I guess I had always assumed that they had some sort of way to get out, but not really put much thought into it.
"Attack helicopters are flying so low that by the time you make the decision to eject and move to take action, you're probably dead anyway, so why add the weight, complexity, vulnerability, cost of an escape system that's almost never likely to be used."
Not an expert, but I think that part is wrong. You can still do a controlled landing with a severely damaged helicopter. If the damage is so bad you can't, perhaps ejection is not really an option either.
No, in fact it is explicitly identified as a war crime by the Geneva convention. Air crew abandoning a plane are distinct from airborne paratroopers in this regard - for obvious reasons.
You're right that its explicitly identified that way but that's because it isn't obvious, if it was obvious they wouldn't have needed to be explicit about it.
For example, retreating soldiers are absolutely still combatants but on the other hand sailors on a life raft are not. Is an ejected pilot like a retreating infantryman or like a sailor on a liferaft? The solution the drafters came up with is that he's a non-combatant while descending but once again becomes a combatant once landed.
Then just temporarily surrender after each shot. The game designers didn't add any kind of cooldown as far as I can tell so you can abuse the mechanic. There are just some restrictions in who you can shoot depending on if they take actions based off you surrendering.
Do you have a definition? From my understanding surrendering for the purpose of keeping yourself alive is fine. If the enemy exposes themselves because of it you can not attack them. Perfidy is about attacking the enemy when they believe you are unable to attack because you for example surrendered. It bans offensive uses of surrendering, but not defensive usages.
>What game are you talking about?
The game of war of which countries have agreed upon a ruleset to play.
IIRC from reading some WWII pilot memoirs that the recommended procedure was to pull up (to bleed off speed), unbuckle, and then push the stick forwards, and the negative G would throw the pilot out of the cockpit.
Might be a bit more difficult in reality with the plane on fire and missing control surfaces, though.
Even in conventional fighter aircraft, pilots would be killed from hitting the rudder or the stabilizer, or in some horrible cases, their chute would get caught on the tail and pull the hapless pilot down with it.
As another anecdote, IIRC the Avro Lancaster crew escape hatch was found to be too small when wearing a parachute. Probably a non-trivial number of crew met their end trapped inside the aircraft.
There were IIRC plans to fix it, but they didn't want a hiccup in production due to implementing the fix, so it was never fixed.
The development of the Avro Manchester (and then Lancaster) was a bit of a mess.
The first Manchester prototype flew just five weeks before WW2 started, and might have been rushed into production.
But there were major flaws with the reliability and power of the engines, and Avro were already working on the Lancaster to replace the Manchester before the first production models even entered service.
The Lancaster is simply a Manchester, with the two Rolls-Royce Vulture engines replaced by four Merlin engines.
> Luxury British watchmakers Bremont are the founders of an interesting tradition. Alongside fellow Brits, aerospace company Martin-Baker, whose construction and supply of ejector seats dominate 70% of the global market, they co-design a signature special edition variant of Bremont’s MBII watch.
> Given their rich affinity with the aviation industry from day dot, Bremont’s aim was to over-engineer one of their timepieces in collaboration with Martin-Baker to withstand the incomprehensible forces felt by the human body when ejecting from an aircraft. These watches, known as MBI, would then be numerically engraved and awarded to any of Martin-Baker’s success stories.
Few watches would have the need to endure extreme temperature changes from -40 to 40 degrees Celsius, or rapid altitude pressures up to 100,000 feet, let alone atomic-level shock testing and prolonged salt water exposure. Bremont Founder Nick English says of the rationale behind the watch, “with the testing and development behind us, both Martin-Baker and Bremont felt that for those pilots who have successfully ejected from a fighter aircraft (it really is a special and elite club), a bespoke and equally special watch would commemorate this well.”
[site] https://bremont.com/products/mbi
[article] https://www.bosshunting.com.au/style/watches/bremont-ejectio...*