Caption Contest #32 Winner - And, Thank You Russia!
Friday, March 5, 2010 at 10:05AM 
This has definitely been a very interesting caption contest. On Tuesday, the original post was picked up by a website in Russia that has a lot more traffic than AirPigz currently does. It makes sense that they are interested cuz it’s a Russian Sukhoi jet fighter that was used in the filming of this ejection stunt.
What followed was more traffic by far than I’ve ever seen here at AirPigz.com. So, I wanna take this time to say thank you to all the cool people from Russia (and the region) who checked out AirPigz in the last few days… I hope you like what you’ve seen and officially ask for your support as I work toward AvGeek World Domination - for the good of us all : )
And congrats again go out to Jay at Schumann Aviation for nailing it with a great caption. It’s pretty hard not to Laugh Out Loud at that one! If things go well, we'll do it all once again next Monday morning (3-8-10)... Russians always welcome!
Reader Comments (2)
You do realize that this is a photo-shop exercise and not an in-flight photo of an egress test? Clues to photo-shop abound. They include:
1. The halo around the seat and rocket plume. If the pilot had a halo, he wouldn’t need and ejection seat, now would he?
2. The stabilizer booms have deployed on the K-36 seat– if this were an in-flight ejection (or from a moving sled), the small stabilizer parachutes would be pulled aft. Instead they are pulled down.
3. The rocket plume is pointing straight down, not down and aft as it would be in an ejection at flight airspeed. Also the plume goes forward near the engine air inlets as it impinges on the skin of the jet. This looks like a static (no forward velocity) shot to me.
4. Look at the tail-plane angle. Nobody would (on purpose, during a filmed test) push the stick full forward during an ejection event. This is a jet on the ramp, not flying.
5. Everyone that has done in-flight ejection tests from a flying aircraft has used a modified canopy to cover the pilot’s station (Martin-Baker's Meteor, China Lake’s F-4, Cold Lake’s T-33, etc). No forward transparency is in evidence. Again, this jet is on the ramp, canopy up – not flying.
6. The Russians are not stupid. Only a stupid person would do an egress test from a jet that had armaments on the hard points.
JD- My primary point for using the pic was just for us to be able to have fun with it in the caption contest (and I think we accomplished that). I did some research before I posted it originally, but not real hardcore, and that lead me to conclude it was real, or at least real to some extent. I sure never believed any of the Mach 2 stuff, but still considered the ejection possible. I did a little more research just now and have found the additional info that suggests it was faked, staged or manufactured on some level. I'm also not sure now if it even has anything to do with the Kerosene Cowboys movie. I'll update the original post with some of this info. Thanx for your take on it : )