Last Flight English Electric Lightning, Dave Stock
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- čas přidán 25. 02. 2010
- The crash of a rare and historic English Electric Lightning MK T5 November 14, 2009, was unique for the history of model and the renown of its pilot, Dave Stock. AVweb compiled both historic video and actual event footage to review the event that saw them lost.
Independent Aviation News At www.avweb.com
Video by Glenn Pew www.glennpew.com - Auta a dopravní prostředky
I only discovered on CZcams today 21 Dec 2019 that Dave Stock was killed. That's really sad and shocking. It took me back to the mid 1990s when I was a aircraft technician on Mirage F1, Dave asked me to do a painting for him of the Mirage F1 shooting a missile. I still have the photos he gave me where he was flying the F1 while shooting a missile. I've painted him a huge painting on an aluminium sheet and signed it F Lindeque. When he asked me how mush he owe me, I said a flip in the Impala when you come to Johannesburg again. He kept his promise and after several months he came to look for me apparently, but I was off sick that day and missed my only chance to fly in a fighter jet with this legendary man Dave Stock. Shortly after that the F1seized services and I never saw Dave again. I made an airbrush painting of the last flight display of Mirage F1 CZ 209 on 27/03/1996 at Waterkloof airforce base and Maj. Mike Edwards signed the painting as he got out of the aircraft that day. Good old memories.
Dave Stock was a friend and gentleman I will never forget. My son was at the airfield and witnessed this tragic event unfold. Gone but not forgotten Dave!
It is well to remember such men as Dave Stock, and such brilliant aircraft.
This is first class narration. Heroic deed - facing the inevitable oblivion and steering what is effectively a winged, and fiery rocket, away from fellow humans.
I was there on that fateful day, and chose not to record his final moments on my camera. It was truly a sad sad day. I do have pics of which I am certain are an indication that he was suffering from either an hydraulic leak, or a smoking internal fire at take-off already, as he rotated directly in-front of me. I also remember thinking at the time that the stream of "whitish stuff" I saw exiting at the same place as the pic of the engine fire in 3:33 was curious and odd.
Rest in Peace Dave.
Nowadays people would without a doubt "dump" their phone video's of such horrible event on CZcams without a second of doubt ... dreaming about all the views >$€etc.
Excellent well made and very well narrated video. I had been searching for details of this crash and this vid answers all questions.
A sad loss of a great pilot and aircraft.
Thank you for that amazing tribute.
GT
I hadn't seen this video before and was surprised to see the photograph of Dave near the end was one I took a few years before the accident. I was also there on the day of the crash; a very sad day. I have a brief clip in my stream of the missing man formation the Silver Falcons flew for Dave on the day.
A fitting piece nicely done, RIP Dave.
RIP Dave, a great pilot and nice man by all accounts. He will live on like the legend of the EE Lightning itself. We subsequently lost not just Dave but the flights from Thunder City and boss Mike himself. A very sad end to a super story. The T5 was a 2 seat "trainer" used for joyrides in its retirement and the explosive canopy release/ejector seat didn't work.
If you read up on the accident report it gets real heartbreaking! That aircraft and the others owned by Thunder City were very poorly maintained! His ejection seat was way past due for overhaul and had charges in it several years expired. His death was only a matter of time, sadly. The whole affair is just sickening.
The accident report does make for interesting reading, but it also raises a number of questions too. First off, the Lightning T5 has a history of hydraulic failures which is catalogued, as well as the whole Lightning fleet being very prone to engine fires. Secondly, the ejector seat failure that is perceived to the direct cause of Dave Stock's death, isn't a result of ejector seat failure but that of one of the canopy ejection latches, something which inhibits the ejection operation. This is not something unique to vintage aircraft, plenty of modern and brand new aircraft have suffered the same sort of failure. It is also noted that the pilot's body was found outside, and some distance from, the aircraft wreckage and didn't exhibit the sort of burning or injuries that would be consistent with being inside the aircraft when it hit the ground, so that raises the possibility that the ejection did take place, eventually, but sadly at too low an altitude to save the pilot. Concerns were raised about maintenance at Thunder City, but, being as the Lightning is a very technical and temperamental aircraft that even national air forces had problems keeping in the air and operating correctly it seems unlikely that the 4 Thunder City Lightnings would have been able to operate for a decade without incident on shoe-string maintenance, let alone the company's Buccaneers. The Hunters, maybe, there have been plenty of cases of retired Hunters owned by people with bigger eyes than wallets killing people, and they are pretty resilient aircraft, but the Lightnings and Buccaneers? It's pretty much statistically impossible. Unfortunately in some places it isn't unusual for government agencies to be used as tools for people in the government to beat people they find unfortunate over the head with. Mike Beachy Head was certainly a person that wasn't afraid to get in someone's face so the question has to be asked, and the length of time it took to complete the accident report rather makes it more likely, that was someone after him. I mean, let's face it, a lot of people in government aren't afraid to stop the truth ruining a good story...
That makes it harder to take ,totally avoidable accident ...🥺
Thanks for posting. I didn't know Dave Stock but my father flew with him in a Hawk at one time and tells of what a thoroughly decent chap he was.
Blue skies and fair winds Dave.
What a beautifully narrated video
R.I.P. Mr. Stock, a fine pilot and a fine aeroplane......
Dave forever you and Mike will live in our Hearts!!!❤❤❤Love you guys!!!Rest in Peace!!!
Awesome video, great respect shown.
3:33....look at the state of the back end under engine 2! She was burning even on the inside, you can see the skin melting under the intense heat of the fire mixing with the chemicals that were sitting in the base of the tail during the overnight leakage! Godbless Dave Stock.
5/5 for this. Great video
A fitting tribute to both pilot & aircraft, reassuring to know that they are not forgotten as the world moves on.
Nice video. Sorry re the conclusion of it all. That footage of the machine lighting up in the wet is awesome!
Gareth, your dad was a legend! R.I.P Dave, your boys are doing you proud!!
Excellent Video
RIP to a amazing pilot and amazing aircraft!!!
A recreational pilot of 20+ years I was in SA at the time and flew the Jet Provost as pax out of Thunder City only about a month later. The feeling of profound shock was indeed felt deeply by pilots and especially at Thunder City. A double hydraulic plus an ejection failure combined must be one of the most tragic accidents ever. While Thunder City until then had a perfect safety record the Lightning has a history of (near) catastrophic engine fires. Ejection failure, however, was uncommon. RIP
RIP dave. Was great Flying with you a true pilot i'll never forget the f5 incident!
The Lightning is the most impressive aircraft I've seen. I was based at RAF Binbrook in the early 80's and fell in love with them then. Reading down the list I do believe DEEREMEYER1 is displaying a fair amount of jealousy and to make adverse comments about Dave Stock, the pilot who died in this video, is unforgivable. That green mist of jealousy is certainly impairing his error of judgement. If it's not that then he's just an idiotic troll and is best ignored.
Just a little foot note to you comment. Yes I have see a lot of DEEREMEYER1'S comments and replies on other Vids, he is a Troll of the worst kind. I looked at his channel it's all guns guns guns, says it all I think.
RIP Dave S
planekrazy Yeah, he is a bit of a twat with his spewing of incorrect 'facts'. RIP Dave.
DEEREMEYER1 is an obnoxious tool and a sycophant of another dickhead called USMC311r or some such wank. I suspect that both of them are 13 yr old plastic modellers 'manning up' behind their keyboards. Certainly wankers of the highest order and typically disrespectful to all while upholding their boorah bullshit for the USMC (- I suspect many Marines would be embarrassed to see them being such twats)
So pilot couldn't eject and couldn't land either, jesus - rock and a hard place or what! Poor guy, incredibly sad. A hero.
This aircraft was a world beater in its day. Includes US aircraft at the time.
There was a fuel leak which caught fire at the rear of the aircraft, the fire burnt through the hydraulic lines. thats a simple and quick explanation but the interim report into the accident is online.
R.I.P.
I was there on that day. It was shocking. Mike Beachy Head had to finally close his operation. The accident investigation found major shortcomings in Thunder City's maintenance programme.
Would've been lovely if the guy who filmed those last moments got some recognition, as well as the photographer who took that last sunset picture. Just wonder how you got my footage, as I never put that video on CZcams on an open link...
O R you're not the brightest crayon in the box, are you?
we'll miss you Dave!
Legendary aircraft ! I knew this one at "RAF Finningley".
@b18boost Is there not still one or two still flying in South Africa?
MrBeezpumph - sorry you were right, Canada did lose 100 CF-104s in Germany. Canada operated them at very low level and the 104s only had a single engine. The CF104 was never a n inteceptor and not operated at high level like the Lightning.. I served on 19sqn Gutersloh and I can tell you that thr Lightning was not a dependable aircraft, it may have been a beautiful fast a/c but it needed a lot of maintenance it had avery short range
@betterthanbrad apparently thunder city did not properly maintain the ejection seat and the canopy, resulting in it's failure to operate
R.I.P what a great plane great pilot deepest respect, Love the lightenings regular visitor to the lpg at bruntingthorpe aerodrome in leicestershire
I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings
And while with silent lifting mind i’ve trod
The untrespassed sanctity of space
Put out my hand and touched the face of God
Clear skies and high flights RIP Dave from one pilot to another, also an ex RAF aircraft engineer.
It looks like fluid pooled under the number two, but you should never have left the ground or even started an engine with her like that 😢
I was due to fly at Thunder City in one of the Lightings may have been ZU-BEX!
The skies will miss your presence.......so will we all
Maybe a stupid question but, what did the previous day's flame out have to do with the next days hydraulic failure?
He flew it like a homesick angel. Now the angel's gone home.
Sadly missed. RIP.
accident report says that hydraulic fluid leaked and the tape and wire to stop the spray of high pressure fluid onto hot parts was not installed correctly.
David Stock put his trust in the ejection seat and the "maintainers" .
I may be wrong but I thought you could manually eject? A long hazardous method but I think it’s possible on early Martin baker seats?
Moving tribute for a what was a double tragedy and a great loss. RIP
Because there is such a thing as "national pride". Pride for being one of the few nations that have successfully created a Mach 2 fighter. Pride that they were able to build such a fighter after being bankrupted and devastated just 20 years before by WWII, rather than just taking the easy route and buying American. The fighter was killed by the same people who said that the RAF was redundant because of ICBM's and cut funding, and most British were furious when certain interests chose the F-4.
It had problems the day before and leaked badly.. and they still flew it the day after??
Precisely. Absolutely disgraceful.
RIP Dave.
I really did,nt about this until now. we lost a damn brilliant pilot . The lightening has a Farley safety record but at the end of the day it is a piece of machinery. and of course only stays safe for so long , we all saw brilliant flying and what it could do so stress. would be a great factor even though it was a hydraulic fault .so my biggest respect to the pilot RIP. .
As you have stated on other post check the internet. Apparently the Italian F-104s were redesigned in Italy
My friend at school went on to fly the EE Lightining, we met back at a class reunion where he admitted to me that he couldn't drive a car! He would tell me about going to 80K plus altitude where he found 'the old girl' difficult to control and him saying about TU 144 Bear gunners giving him the bird off the coast of Scotland, anyone who flew these aircraft are heroes in my eyes, Thunder city are a very professional outfit and Dave Stock was a true professional right up to the end, God Bless him.
There's a book available called "The Lightning Boys" which is a compilation of stories from pilots of this aircraft. Very good book and well worth a read.
Respect to a true Gentleman, selfless to the end.
that vertical climb is epic @0.53
Any given reason for the ejector seat not working? Hydraulics?
Respects
The CF-104 was originally meant to be an interceptor but Canada used it as a low level strike aircraft , which according to one post is why Canada and Germany crashed lost so many.It all happened many years ago so does it really matter.I just enjoy batting Deeremeyer when i'm board like tonight
I love the lightning!
Lest We Forget😢
Seems unnecessarily gutsy to be using the full performance of these birds in their preservation phase.
What a pilot, what a plane . . .
A excellent video but such a sad story.
Does anyone know why the ejection seat failed? Did it fail to eject or did it eject but the parachute fail to deploy?
(From memory) I believe there were a number of flagged pins that had to be removed before take-off and inserted into a panel in the cockpit to arm the seat.
@lewdoom1 I think he meant tu-142...
The Germans didn't choose the Starfighter over Lightning.The Germans were set to buy the Saunders Roe jet,rocket powered fighter, a fighter you've never heared of but Lockheed paid German officials as well as many other countries to buy the Starfighter, even the US Airforce didn't want the Starfighter ,a daylight good weather fighter
what a lad. RIP
I was also there that day - shocking to see the plane go down and not knowing if he ejected. What seems to be forgotten though, is that the public could enter their names and cell phone number for a draw that would've taken place after lunch time. If your name was drawn, you would've been the passenger on that very plane during the afternoon....
Remember being on holiday in 1975......Rhosneigr Anglesey Wales. These would take off and the caravan and everything in it shook.
Remember these in the mid 50s in Preston Lancs (Warton was 5 miles up the road)
they were called P1s then ( prototype 1 )
what English Electric did with the lightning was brilliant given the dire straits given the then UK economy,
Just think 8 years before they built the 1st Canberra in a Vauxhall garage in the top story in Preston
English Electric was a huge engineering concern building trams, trains, domestic appliances and other people's planes in WWII. The Canberra was their first plane of their own design so they acquired premises as they needed them. Both Samlesbury and Warton were huge resources as well as their works in Preston city. Don't confuse the 'dire straights' of the UK economy with an actual shortage of cash. We did stuff in the late 40s and 50s that we could never do now. Building that first atom bomb and then hydrogen bomb for example. The financial resources required to build those plants such as Sellafield, Springfields, Capenhurst, Risley Labs, Culcheth Labs, Culham Labs, Daresbury labs, Harwell labs and Aldermaston as well as all of the breeder reactor programmes were mind boggling. No the country these days is running on fumes - we can't even afford to mend the roads unfortunately.
@@Lyingleyen EE made the Deltic Locomotive too
RIP Dave Stock I beleieve it was you I was to fly with as I wanted to book a flight in that aircraft with you.
Terrible loss for all of aviation. Wish I could have met him, and talked about the Lightning over a beer or two.
Sounds like a true professional who did everything he could under the circumstances.
🙏
I spoke to a former RAF engineer who works on a part-time basis for BAe systems as an investigator. He was directly involved in the investigation of Dave Stock's crash. The cause? *POOR maintenance by civilian engineers who were not trained to service the Lightning to military standards. BEX had at least *FIVE* faults on it when Dave Stock took it up. THREE of those faults would have seen the aircraft grounded had it been in RAF service for significant maintenance.
BAe systems will not support, or provide spares to any of it's legacy fast jets that are in civilian hands because they do not trust civilian operators to carry out adequate servicing and maintenance.
Dave Stock died because his ejection seat didn't work- DUE TO POOR MAINTENANCE!!
why did the ES fail? anyone? thanks
The Lightning takes off from Linconshire, climbs to altitude, refuels and is across the Norigian coast in less than six minutes. Whether it could fight or not doesn't matter.
Had the Lightning shot down every Russian bomber the nuclear missiles were still there.The cold war was all about Countries beating there chests.
With the loss of the aircraft in this video; none as far as I know. Wikipedia refers to a single aircraft being restored in the USA.
I don't think that is very fair (I'm Danish and we had the F104) It had many worthy attributes, but it is mostly legendary for killing its own pilots. The British have every right to be proud of the Lightning. It was a good aircraft.
Phantom.two engines side by side!
*"16,000 hours"*
Then the Hydraulics failure, then the Ejector seat failure, then the fire in the tail pipe. What are the odds? Poor guy never had a chance. What can anyone do in that awful situation? .....Almost 16,000 hours......How many days is that..... it's almost as weird as 3 catastrophic failures in a row...
Please read the accident report!!! The main contributor to the accident is Stock. You can't abuse the plain and ignore signs of problems. Stock could have declared the plain as not air-worthy. Instead he took off in a plain, that leaked fuel over the hot part of the engines. The fuel leakage was so bad, emergency crews were fighting it for almost an hour in the morning just before the accident. It was established, that fuel was dripping from the airplain while he was rolling to the starting position and during the whole flight. Stock ignored the signs and drilled the plain into the ground after a fire in the aft-section of the plain destroyed the hydraulics.
I also disagree with the presentation of AVweb. Stock did an unscheduled presentation in the evening before for a whine tasting event, ending it with an stationary afterburner burn of more then 30 sec and none-standard shut down of the airplain. After problems to restart the engine he simple left the airplain on the taxi-way and joined the whine-tasting event. That's not airman-ship, that is showmanship.
Harrier losses are 16%, this includes those lost in the Falklands,although none were lost in air to air combat and those bought down by bird strikes take those out and the % falls.
Look on the Harrier as a very high performance helicopter since it can do everything a helicopter can do.
Why don't you take a swipe at the Lynx, it's the fastest conventional helicopter ,it can loop, barrel roll and when it does the back flip it's a real eye opener.
MrBeezumph
Sad...!
if what i read is correct then it was the canopy bolts that didnt work not the seat itself :(
RIP
Ejection seats are not supposed to fail. Somebody in the seat shop fucked up bad.
I imagine that if the Lightning was going to over take a Concorde it would have to do it pretty much straight away eh? Lovely looking aircraft xx
And I am sure they would have done had they realised that at the time. Sometimes these old aircraft crash. It happens.
Man,,,,he did everything right, tried a tried b tried c and lost his life with the ac.....RIP
F15 & F22?
You can fly free now Dave....RIP
Check the internet Deeremeyer, the Starfighter has the worst accident rate of any aircraft used by the USAF .The Italian Starfighters were redesigned by the Italians.
I've also found out tonight from the Internet that in mock dog fights the o so slow Hawker hunter would beat the Starfighter
They were retired because they weren't needed any more. They were legendary because of their speed (same as the Starfighter, only better).
Отличный, для своего времени самолёт. Но без ложки дёгтя не обошлось. Например, что бы заменить верхний двигатель, механикам приходилось снимать и исправный нижний.
Did you miss it? the point was, the Lightning, was just as fast as the F104, and with its better safety record, was a better aeroplane design.
That Starfighter was not a standared Starfighter,even Chuck Yeager crashed one
I am a big fan of Thunder City. I also feel the loss of a good pilot however, He should not have flown that plane if he knew he had a hydraulic leak, which could metastasize into a landing gear failure. He would still be alive if his landing gear would have deployed properly
The Lightning was retired in the 80's after the fall of the USSR as the Lightning was no longer needed to destroy Russian bombers and longevity doesn't mean it was the best the Spanish Airforce was still using Heinkels bombers in the 70's
Beautiful aircraft and I for one am happy to have seen it in flight. Despite its apparent shortcomings no other country ever came close to the Concorde. Yes they were looking to "shitcan it" as you mentioned, but I think that was because of financial mismanagement. The accident was a blessing to them because it gave them the excuse to kill the plane off once and for all.
I'm not disputing this at all :-) I liked the Concorde, is all, as do many many fans today. Nothing wrong with that.
when something goes wrong in the air you cant pull over to the side of the road.
this sucks...at least he had a great life!
on a side note...the F-15 does mach 2.8...so is the lighting faster than that?