Featured Image Credit: YouTube / Martin-Baker
Flying a fighter jet takes a special kind of courage, and dealing with the risks is part of the job.
But what's scarier than flying at fast speeds is the possibility of a stall.
Without getting too into the mechanics of the vehicle, stalling is when a plane can’t generate enough lift to stay in the air.
It can happen if a plane turns too sharply or climbs too steeply.
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You'll probably be familiar with it in your early days of driving school when you were still getting the hang of clutch bite.
But with planes that defy gravity, stalling in the air is much more frightening than stalling on the ground.
Sometimes it is possible to recover from a stall by regaining speed by increasing engine power or diving the aircraft.
One Canadian Forces jet pilot had a very near miss when his CF-18 Hornet he was flying lost power.
Captain Brian Bews (now a major), had a close call with a stall during a media day at an airshow in Lethbridge, Canada, in July 2010.
In an attempt to make up for the loss of thrust, Bews tried pushing the remaining engine to full power. But, unfortunately, this pushed the plane to a dangerous angle.
On this occasion, Bews explained that the crash had happened after one of the engines on his jet had failed.
Bews had attempted to compensate for the loss of thrust by going to full power on the other engine, but this pushed the plane too far in one direction, resulting in the terrifying angle that you can see in the video.
'Ejecting is such a rare occurrence that you don’t ever think you’ll use it,' Bews told Maclean's. 'We always take the training very seriously, but in the back of your mind, you’re thinking: "Well, what are the chances?"'
The pilot added: 'There really wasn’t a whole lot of time to think. When I saw the nose of the jet point at one of the big white tents at the airfield, I just thought: ‘I gotta get out.’ That’s when I pulled the handle and went for a ride.'
The Royal Canadian Air Force CF-18 Demonstration Team helped to land the aircraft after handling the emergency with cool professionalism.
A scary near miss to say the least.
