Now that is what I call some incredible luck

Vector4Food

Vector4Food

This job would be easier without all the airplanes
10 December 2004: Captain Miles Selby died in a mid-air collision during training near Mossbank, Saskatchewan while practising the co-loop manoeuvre. The other pilot, Captain Chuck Mallett, was thrown from his destroyed aircraft while still strapped into his seat. While tumbling towards the ground, he was able to unstrap, deploy his parachute and land with only minor injuries
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No video exists of the crash that I know of, but that has to be some unbelievable luck, not to mention having the presence of mind to realize that you didn't eject, but you're no longer sitting inside your airplane.

This part of the story was never fully made public during the accident reports (Anything involving the Snowbirds usually garners pretty big media attention here "Aging jets, why are we spending the money on a display team, use the hornet etc")
 
canadian_atc said:
that has to be some unbelievable luck, not to mention having the presence of mind to realize that you didn't eject, but you're no longer sitting inside your airplane.
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This is probably not as amazing situational awareness or reaction as it may seem.

In ejection seats where the man-seat separation is a relatively slow and less than reliable process (like in the T-37 trainer -- which the Tudor, there, is very similar to), we are taught to try and "beat the seat" as part of our normal emergency procedure. Basically, if you did find yourself free falling in the seat, you were supposed to try and go for the lap belt, unfasten it and physically push away from the seat, and then reach over to the D-ring and manually deploy the parachute.

The survival instinct is a strong one, and when something majorly wrong happens, most pilots survival instincts drive them to go back to what they've been trained to do. When the pilot realized something catastrophic had happened, and subsequently found himself freefalling in the seat, I'm sure he knew exactly what to do next.
 
thevideographer said:
It's not the first time a pilot has been tossed from his own aircraft and survived:

http://www.thedigitalaviator.com/blog/?p=504
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Fascinating story, thanks for posting!

When he talked about how he was ripped from the plane with seat belts still around him, it reminded me that when I was in high school and a local airport kid there was a Beech 18 that was flying checks that lost power and tried to shoot a VOR approach into our airport, he couldn't maintain altitude and hit the back side of the last hill before reaching the valley where our airport was located. We had his seat belt in the hangar, still fastened, still attached to chunks of the metal supports that were ripped out of the plane when he impacted. Few people every saw that sobering piece of history that could even make a 17 year old indestructible kid realize that flying airplanes is serious business and people really die doing it.
 
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