American KC-135 refuelling plane crashes in Iraq, US military say

DEI hire?

She’s certainly qualified…

Nothing like staring at the green light on the belly of the KC-135 then your brain shorts out and you start over correcting until you slam into the belly. Lmaoo Edit: didn’t mean to make a joke of the real situation but rather about the game. RIP to anyone who lost their lives.

Hopefully, he fucks the business end.

Sure it's unlikely you'd get to the parachute and launch yourself out but it's possible if you get lucky enough. With no parachutes available there's no possibility.

Except you have a better chance of trying to make the plane land than bailing out. Basically, if the plane is damaged, you are going to be in 1 of 3 scenarios, and the parachute is never the better option in any of them. 1. You still have decent control of the plane still. In this instance, landing the plane is relatively safe. Oh, the plane is a complete loss, but foam and emergency teams exist for a reason, and you can dump fuel. Meanwhile, the parachute is dangerous, because the plane sucks to bail out of because you might hit the engine or an antenna on the way out, but you can kind of control your exit and probably be safe. (Also they can't change the design because they prioritize not getting hit by enemies in the first place over being able to parachute out easily.) So it's safer to stay in the plane. 2. You have poor control of the plane. In this instance, landing the plane is much more dangerous. But bailing out is also more dangerous too because it's way harder to control your exit from the plane, so you are even more likely to hit something on your way out. So again, it's safer to stay in the plane. 3. You have no control of the plane. The G-forces are so high that you have no chance of getting the parachute on. If you leave your seat, you're going to learn what a pinball feels like. You can try to stay in your seat and at least attempt to turn this into a scenario 2, but quite frankly, good night. Arguably, you could compare having the parachute there to not wearing your seatbelt. Technically there are instances where it is better to not wear your seatbelt, but they aren't likely.

You assume the plane is remaining intact and stable long enough that you can deploy the system, and people can get to it. That is increasingly unlikely if two planes smack into eachother. Its a well established and reliable airframe with 4 engines. The number of things that can happen in one that aren't immediately catastrophic are very limited. They did all kinds of studies and found that the odds of being killed bailing out were worse in any reasonable situation where you had enough control of the plane to bail out in the first place, vs riding it out. Then you add up the time and money in maintaining any kind of system, even if its just some parachutes and a door, training for something that will likely never be used, its impact on readiness (mission canceled because a chute failed some check, the hatch didn't work right, etc) and then do the math and say, "if we spent all that money and effort elsewhere, we could make some other practical aspect far safer or reliable...."

I'm not sure how the KCs are set up. But I flew on the AWACS and fun fact: when they used to give us parachutes, the plan was to just jump down a metal chute that was toward the front of the plane. It was never used, to my knowledge, and they got rid of the parachutes because jumping down that chute was going to be certain death anyways lol. Most of these larger platforms, the plan is simply to just never get shot down. Most don't have any real defensive countermeasures.

I mean there's a direct comparison here everyone is aware of, which is they fly all the time on commercial jets and none of them have parachutes. The incident records for these planes is probably about as low as those anyway.