Speedy wrote:
I would still like to hear WHY he decided to get out...as to whether the controls were jammed or severed or what, in the couple of seconds before he jettisoned the canopy, he felt that made him decide.
Not in ANY WAY questioning the decision...just the pilot in me is curious as to what he felt. Because knowing me, I probably wouldn't have had the whereabouts to get out as quickly as he did.
Pilots who fly in the display environment with high performance aircraft ,either have going in based on past experience, or develop as experience is gained, a sense for what is survivable and what isn't survivable. In other words when something like this happens to a pilot like Davies, it's an instant mental evaluation that short circuits the normal reasoning process and reaches a conclusion. The way I've always explained it is that through experience you have placed in your subconscious a laundry list of unsurvivable scenarios. Impact evaluation fits exactly into this short circuit trigger response. Davies felt the impact in the Mustang and the Spad driver felt the impact as it affected HIS airplane. Each felt the impact differently and each impact triggered individual response paths.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the instant Davies was hit he KNEW the hit was fatal. He would have initiated immediately the process of leaving the airplane even as he was "feeling the controls for proper response. These things would be done simultaneously. The only thing that would stop the process of leaving the aircraft would be a "felt" PROPER response from the controls that indicated survival was possible.
Not getting that.......and this would be happening in scant seconds.........egress would proceed as initiated.
The variables in a situation like this one all come together at once.
Davies survived because he reacted based on his vast experience. A pilot with lesser experience might not have survived the slim time line.
Bottom line here is that Davies literally multitasked his decision process rather than following a linear series decision path. It was his ability to do this that saved his life.
In low altitude display flying of any kind you either have the experience to deal with something like this incident at the instant it occurs or you don't. Davies had that experience.
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