Saturday, November 2, 2013

"Miraculous Escape From Death"

Air Marshal Sir David Grahame Donald KCB DFC AFC RAF (27 July 1891 – 23 December 1976), often known as Sir Grahame Donald, was a Royal Naval Air Service pilot during World War I, a senior Royal Air Force officer between the wars and a senior RAF commander during World War II.
Donald also became famous for his miraculous escape from death having fallen from his Sopwith Camel at 6,000 feet (1,800 m) in 1917. On that fateful summer's afternoon he attempted a new manoeuvre in his Sopwith Camel and flew the machine up and over, and as he reached the top of his loop, hanging upside down, his safety belt snapped and he fell out. He was not wearing a parachute as a matter of policy. Incredibly, the Camel had continued its loop downwards, and Donald landed on its top wing. He grabbed it with both hands, hooked one foot into the cockpit and wrestled himself back in, struggled to take control, and executed "an unusually good landing". In an interview given 55 years later he explained, "The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly and terra firma looked damnably 'firma'. As I fell I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby. Suddenly I fell back onto her."

Lifted from Wikipedia

10 comments:

test said...

I would have shit myself (and then died).

Does he have children? If so the miracle continues.

virgil xenophon said...

File under the "better to be lucky than good" category..

rhhardin said...

You feel a whump on the downside of a loop as you pass through the wake of yourself going up, if it's done symmetrically.

rhhardin said...

My atomic clocks show various hours.

Some fall back, some don't.

Atomic clocks are micro-accurate except about what hour it is.

AllenS said...

rh, mine hasn't moved.

AllenS said...

I gave the atomic clock a push.

bagoh20 said...

Does "atomic" mean a pain in the ass solution that's worse than the nonexistent problem it's supposed to solve? If not, we need such a word now days for everything from a "Stimulus" to Obamacare to atomic clocks.

Phil 314 said...

I'm still trying to figure out the physics of this given the pilot's fall velocity and the slow arc of the Sopwith Camel. I can't imagine how the plan caught up to the pilot.

Someone please help.

One of you science guys.

Phil 314 said...

how the "plane" caught...

bagoh20 said...

I think he lied, and actually hit the ground and bounced back up and then into the plane.

Seriously though, if we say that level flight is at 6 o'clock, and full inverted at 12, and he didn't exit the plane until past the top maybe over to say 2 o'clock, then he could have fallen back in pretty quickly as the plane rotated under him at maybe 4 or 5 o'clock.

That's how I always do it anyway.