Starting from the first test pilots, a lot of people died for us to get to the point to launch that flight. So while no one died on the flight, lots of people died just getting us there. If I recall, in The Right Stuff, it's mentioned that those early test pilots had something like a 25% mortality rate.

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ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Think about the "failure mode" of the aircraft that won World War II, the Supermarine Spitfire.

There was a fuel tank mounted between the engine and cockpit so if it took enough of a hit to puncture right through (not hard, in practice) the failure mode was that the cockpit was now full of a 350mph jet of burning petrol.

Still, it did the job.

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wat10000 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The early jet age was pretty nuts. Check the Wikipedia page for a random fighter from the era and you'll see figures like, 1,300 built, 50 lost in combat, 1,100 lost in accidents. And that's operational aircraft. Test pilots were in even more danger.

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Quinner 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some were pretty bad, but none were nearly that bad. The B-58 Hustler lost 22% of its airframes, the F7U Cutlass 25%, the F-104 Starfighter in German service lost 33%. And those were outliers.

	▲	wat10000 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're right, those numbers are from the F-8 but include non-total-loss accidents. I don't think the numbers you quoted are outliers, though. The F-100 lost ~900 out of 2,300. The F-106 lost ~120/342. That's a pretty big list of planes with a 1/5-1/3 loss rate.

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jaggederest 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You should go back even a little further, the USPS air mail service lost 31 of the first 40 pilots.

	▲	mrguyorama 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Back in the days where the plan was "So we've built literal signal fires and giant concrete arrows and well, good luck, it won't help"

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ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have you ever listened to Robert Calvert's "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters"?