Hawk – bird strike on take-off, and ejection

This is a really interesting and fascinating video. It’s a pilot’s eye view (including HUD overlay) of a training flight in a hawk jet – the same kind of aircraft the red-arrows fly.

In this video, as the aircraft is taking off a bird is sucked into it’s one engine, killing the engine completely. The video is below, but here is my analysis.

The video starts with the plane about to pass the upwind end of the runway, a large object is seen flying underneath the aircraft, in a fraction of a second, 1 import thing happens… The pilot pulls back to raise the nose. – This is an impressively fast reaction to the situation, because as thrust is lost the aircraft is only going to descend, however at the point thrust is lost the plane has more airspeed than is necessary to maintain altitude. By raising the nose they are ‘trading airspeed for altitude’ – the perfect response to give them time to handle the situation.
You can then hear the instructor reading out information and instructions in a very calm voice – asking the student to attempt a restart and saying ‘prepare to abandon aircraft alright buddy’. This is only 14 seconds after the bird has hit.
You can hear heavy breathing due to the situation, but both the instructor and the student remain calm and focus on solving the problem – which quickly turns into saving their lives by ejecting. They even have time to radio telling they are ‘ejecting to the north’.
It shows how quickly a situation can change in an aircraft, and how training and quick responses – as well as clear thinking in an emergency, are hugely important.