Talk:de Havilland Sea Vixen

Accident rate

These two pages at seavixen.org, including an article by a retired RN officer, suggest some typical reasons for the type's high accident rate. The accidents occurred for all kinds of reasons, including pilot error on approach to unfamiliar foreign airfields at night, but the typical reasons seem to be to do with (i) carrier landings on small decks at high speed in a large, fast, heavy but low-drag aircraft with the engines necessarily wound right back and, in the usual way of jet engines, slow to wind up again in an emergency due to 'turbo-lag', and (ii) a very demanding night anti-ship exercise called the 'Glow-Worm Attack' which crews were required to practise until the procedure was revised due to the loss rate. In terms of crew casualties there was an issue with the navigator's overhead hatch on the FAW.1, which had to be jettisoned before ejection, though this was addressed with the FAW.2, which had a frangible hatch that the navigator could eject straight through (if everything worked).

https://www.seavixen.org/sea-vixen-accidents-public-page

https://www.seavixen.org/seavixen-operational-roles/night-glow-worm-attack

It seems worth mentioning since a couple of poorly-informed American bloggers posting at The National Interest site have lately tried to claim that the Sea Vixen was 'the worst fighter ever'. This from the nation that gave you the Vought F7U Cutlass, an almost perfectly useless aircraft with no radar, underpowered engines and negligible weapon load, which suffered a 25% loss rate due to accidents in just three years of service with the US Navy, even though US carrier captains generally disembarked their Cutlass squadrons before sailing anywhere because there was no point trying to operate the Cutlass at sea. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:09, 28 November 2023 (UTC)