[imagesource: YouTube / Fighterbomber]

I watched Top Gun: Maverick recently and had a good chuckle.

Just enough throwbacks to the 1986 classic to draw in the nostalgic crowd with sufficient modern updates to appeal to a younger market.

That’s how you put together a box office smash hit which has grossed in excess of $1,48 billion worldwide.

It doesn’t matter that Tom Cruise would never have survived that ejection scene at a speed of Mach 10,5. Having Cruise die in the first 15 minutes would probably be bad for business, so I’m not surprised reality was ignored.

Back in the real world, first-person footage of a fighter pilot ejection is pretty tough to come by. That’s what makes the video below, emerging from Ukraine, such a find.

PetaPixel with the details:

The Russian soldier was piloting a Sukhoi Su-25SM Frogfoot close air support jet and his headcam recorded the moment he lost control of the plane before crashing into a field and erupting into a ball of flames…

“This is probably the first ever action camera combat jet ejection footage,” Rome-based aviation blogger David Cenciotti wrote.

Cenciotti said that although there are certain details we may never know, replaying the video at slow speed does give us some clues.

Before we get to those, here’s the footage:

Cenciotti from his personal blog, The Aviationist, wrote:

…the aircraft involved in the incident appears to be the Su-25SM with bort number 09 red. Shortly after the pilot ejects, we get a glimpse at the Frogfoot: there seems to be fire coming out of one of the engines (the image seems reversed, so it should be the right one). Part of the tail is also missing.

We don’t know exactly when (probably last summer – considered the landscape) and where the Su-25 crashed; we can’t even say whether it was shot down by Ukrainian air defense systems (or MANPADS – Man Portable Air Defense System), as it seems more likely, or it went down for other reasons.

Whatever led to the ejection, it’s certainly the first of its kind to come out of the war in Ukraine.

Sukhoi Su-25 is a ground attack aircraft used by the Russians to take out Ukrainian armour and infrastructure. Because it flies so low and carries a high risk of being hit by anti-aircraft fire, the cockpit is armoured.

Every Russian plane that goes down, no matter the circumstances, is another win for Ukraine.

[sources:petapixel&aviationist]