F-15 Engine Fire Cockpit Video

[Rhino]

An F-15 has an engine fire and attempts an emergency landing at Whiteman Air Force Base. This is the HUD recording of the incident. I like the way the airplane notifies him of insufficient fuel and an overtemp condition after he has ejected and the plane has crashed.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8df_1205185501

[Timberwolf]

Serious situation, but the last couple seconds are precious!! LOL

[Incident_command]

I could watch stuff like that all day. Not for the crashes but the professionalism they exhibit. Those guys are it. Cool and under control at all times.

[Elgalad]

You can hear it in his breathing which gets quicker towards the end. But he (the pilot) maintains his cool even when announcing he's gonna 'punch'.

That's professionalism.


-Elgalad

[Lazarus]

If he punched out after he was already on the runway, wouldn't that be sort of a hard landing for him?

And you'd think the onboard computer would at least say "Bye Bye" upon his exit...

[Rhino]

The F-15 has zero-zero ejection seats, meaning you can safely eject at zero altitude and zero velocity. Besides, with the winds that the tower mentioned when he was on final, he probably wouldn't have landed on the runway anyway.

[Rhino]

He had about a 4 to 5 knot crosswind, just off the nose. The ejection seat also propels him forward and up to about 200 feet. Since he ejected just short of the end of the runway, he likely would not have come down on the runway itself, but it's possible.

[Lazarus]

Is that enough altitude for the chute to deploy? Or do they give him a big pillow...:smirky:

[BabyBeastie]

I didn't hear anyone in the video say anything about engaging the fire suppression system.

[Rhino]

In a single seat aircraft, they don't usually announce that. It's assumed. It's common to announce it in multi-seat aircraft so that all other crewmembers are aware, and also because it's sometimes the responsibilty of another crewmember to activate it.

[BabyBeastie]

I also didn't hear anything from 'bitching betty' in the video stating that he had an engine fire. She usually comes on and says "Engine fire right" or "Engine fire left."

He may have already initiated the fire suppression system because a light on the panel under the glare screen would have lit up. When it comes on, you push on the light. That also acts as a pushbutton switch. This activates a canister of TCTFE (Halon) and will only put out one engine. I don't know if they still use Halon. Then the fire usually goes out...usually.

[Rhino]

I assumed that's what the loud beeps were. Not all aircraft systems 'talk' to the pilot, and not all of those that do, talk for every event.

[cerberus]

Silly zoomie! Ejection seats are for wimps! :evilgrin:

[RogerFGay]

You can hear it in his breathing which gets quicker towards the end. But he (the pilot) maintains his cool even when announcing he's gonna 'punch'.

That's professionalism.


-Elgalad

That seemed to be after he realized that he couldn't stop the plane. I think I'd-a been breathin' kinda hard too. Oh shit! Time for a new plan.

[BabyBeastie]

I assumed that's what the loud beeps were. Not all aircraft systems 'talk' to the pilot, and not all of those that do, talk for every event.Yep, that's one of the nicer things about the warning systems in modern military jet fighters. They give the pilots voice and tone warnings. That "bingo fuel" voice warning in the video lets the pilot know that he'd better turn around NOW if he wants to make it home with the gas he's got left. Other warnings or advisories instruct the pilot to "fly right" or "fly left," "altitude," "glide slope," etc. The digital female voice is used for the more dire emergencies. Supposed to be more "relaxing" to the pilot under those stressful conditions.

I also agree that the pilot didn't get very upset until he was absolutely certain that he would run out of runway. He must have landed at a municipal airport or something because he came to the end of the runway really quick!

[Rhino]

The digital female voice is used for the more dire emergencies. Supposed to be more "relaxing" to the pilot under those stressful conditions.Actually, believe it or not, it's because studies show men pay more attention to a female voice. Now, I imagine a lot of wives would disagree with that, but maybe it's really that men pay more attention to a female voice that's not their wife! :rotflmbo:

[cerberus]

The digital female voice is used for the more dire emergencies. Supposed to be more "relaxing" to the pilot under those stressful conditions.
She's usually just called "Bitching Betty"....

[BabyBeastie]

Yep. She talks only when something's wrong. lol

The male voice tells the pilot to make small corrections, etc. I don't know what his name is. Sometimes they talk over each other. lol

[Rhino]

Interesting.

An important note, the intelligibility of female and male speech is equivalent under most ordinary living conditions. However, due to small differences between their acoustic speech signals, called speech spectra, one can be more or less intelligible than the other in certain situations such as high levels of noise. Anecdotal information, supported by some empirical observations, suggests that some of the high intensity noise spectra of military aircraft cockpits may degrade the intelligibility of female speech more than that of male speech (Nixon et al., 1998).http://www.carrielee.net/pdfs/Cockpit.pdf

[Rhino]

CONCLUSIONS: The intelligibility of female speech was unacceptable at the highest measured noise level of 115 dB and may constitute a problem for other military aviators. The intelligibility degradation due to the noise can be neutralized by use of an available, improved noise-canceling microphone, by the application of current active noise reduction technology to the personal communication equipment, and by the development of a voice communications system to accommodate the speech produced by both female and male aviators.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9681374?ordinalpos=2&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsP anel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

[Rhino]

...An earwitness testimony study (Wilding and Cook, 2000) showed that while males showed no differentiable ability to recognise male over female voices, females showed an enhanced ability to recognise female voices, as well as being more accurate overall. Thus when a preference is expressed, it seems to be for the female voice, and female listeners appear more attuned to speaker characteristics than do males...

...The results clearly show that nearly all the variance found in the study is due to the way the words are spoken (the urgent vs nonurgent comparison) and the differences between the two voices (female vs ambiguous). Although there are some other effects, they are small by comparison. Most notably, although participants were told that the voices were either both female, or one male and one female, or were given no instructions, and that it was previously determined that the ambiguous voice was truly ambiguous, no differences were found between the three groups. Therefore it is safe to conclude that the differences found between the speakers are due to the physical differences between the voices and not assumptions that the listener brings to bear in the light of the knowledge that the speaker is either male or female. The key acoustic difference between the speakers was the difference in pitch in their voices, and some differences in voicing. This difference is enough to produce very large differences in urgency ratings between the speakers. As striking, if not more so, is the difference between the urgent and the nonurgent utterances with urgent utterances being rated much more urgent than nonurgent utterances, for both speakers.

With respect to the interactions, a pattern similar to earlier studies was found whereby the more urgent voice overall (the female voice) produces a greater range of urgency ratings across the two voicing conditions. This has been replicated many times (Barzegar and Wogalter 1998a, 1998b, 2000, Hellier et al, 2002; Edworthy et al, in press (a)) using female and male voices. As to be expected, these other findings are more extreme in that they show the female voice to be more urgent in the urgent condition, but the male voice to be more urgent in the nonurgent condition; our results here show an advantage for the female speaker in both urgent and nonurgent conditions, with the differences being smaller in the nonurgent condition....

...As a methodological issue, it needs to be noted that studies in this area have typically used very few speakers. However, Barzegar and Wogalter (1998a, 1998b, 2000) used three speakers of each sex and found the same pattern of results within speaker sex, and Hollander and Wogalter (2000) took into account both the sex of the speaker and their individual voices and found no main effect for individual speaker. Moreover, if the effects are largely acoustic, then the number of speakers used does not matter, as subjective judgments will follow acoustic changes in a systematic way. The more speakers vary from one another, the more urgency judgements based on those voices will differ. In exactly the same way, differences in judgements between urgent and nonurgent utterances will vary more if the utterances are acoustically more different from one another....

...The effects for the individual words are also of some interest. A small but significant effect was found for signal word, and this effect largely replicates earlier findings both for spoken words and for written versions of those same words (e.g. Leonard et al, 1989; Wogalter and Silver, 1990, 1995; Laughery et al, 1993; Braun and Silver, 1995; Wogalter et al, 1998; Hellier et al, 2000b; Edworthy et al, in press (a)). Words such as 'Deadly' and 'Danger' produce higher urgency ratings than words such as 'Attention' and 'Note'. Whilst some of these effects will be due to the particular way in which individual words were spoken (as evidenced by the 3-way speaker x urgency x word interaction), there is plenty of evidence to suggest that part of the differences between the words is due to the semantic strength of the words themselves. For example, the word 'Deadly' has a more serious implication than the word 'Note' or 'Attention' and would therefore be expected to produce higher ratings of urgency just on the meaning of the word alone, independently of the way in which it is spoken...http://www.noiseandhealth.org/article.asp?issn=1463-1741;year=2003;volume=6;issue=21;spage=39;epage=50 ;aulast=Edworthy

So basically, it doesn't really matter much if the voice is male or female. But it does matter how the words are spoken, and which words are spoken. Interestingly, female voices seem to be at a very slight disadvantage in high noise cockpits, such as military jets. However, female pilots are more able to key in to a female computer voice. As the study notes, it basically boils down to personal preference, but female usually wins out.