I sent it but I can't find the video. He said Mica is equivalent to the AIM-120.
It is his youtube channel :
Damn I can't look for it that dude has waaaaay too many videos to go through. If you posted it on this thread, I'll just backtrack and see if I can find it. Very interested in what he said about that.
Speaking of this ex-rafale pilot, there was an amazing story that he did one of his videos on I remember watching it a while ago and it was about a huge mystery of a partial ejection on a ride-along flight!
So, just like many air forces, the US, Canada, the UK etc., France also does that where they either award one of the crewmen/women for their excellent service by taking them in the backseat of a fighter on a short flight as a reward. Sometimes they'll do it for people in their town or volunteers at the airbase etc.
Well, L'Armee de L'air did the same thing with one of their rafales and the winner of this ride was an older gentleman from a local town and I forget why he was awarded the ride, doesn't matter anyway. So they do the whole quick training thing which takes a few days I think and they check his heart and medical conditions and teach him basic survival skills in case they have to bail out etc. Tell him NOT to touch the stick or throttle or ejection handles or certain buttons and all that happy stuff and they get ready to go flying.
They strap him in, one more review of all the no-no touching checklist and off they go down the tarmac. Local older gentleman is in the backseat of the rafale and the pilot tells him they're going to take off and does explain to him what he will be doing as far as maneuvers etc.
They race down the runway, pilot pulls back the stick, rafale takes off and the pilot puts the aircraft pretty much in a vertical stoop for a short period and then abruptly levels off.
As soon as the pilot levels off from the vertical take-off, the canopy goes KAPOWWW and blows off and older gent goes flying out in his seat!!!!! Pilot is freaking out has no idea wtf just happened lmaoooo and banks sharply, calls mayday mayday and they land him immediately.
They find out later that what happened was once the pilot came out of the vertical flight and abruptly leveled off, that created a negative G force enough to pull the older fella up a bit out of his seat. That sensation automatically triggered his own reaction to grab the closest thing available since he felt like he was going to pop out of his seat not having been told what to expect from that negative G. So what does he grab immediately and as fast and as hard as possible? Yep, the ejection handles in-between his legs! looool and out the aircraft he went.
Poor guy had no idea what hit him or what happened until he was on the ground and emergency crews attended to him and they went back and talked to the pilot and the guy and when they asked him why he grabbed the ejection handles when they specifically told him not to. He said he felt like he was going to pop out of his seat and was afraid his head would crash into the glass canopy and was just reaching for anything to hold him into his seat.
So even though the seatbelts are very tight and barely allow any motion, there's still enough slack to move a little tiny bit but the sensation of being lifted is still going to be there despite the harness and all that and he was simply automatically reacting to something he certainly wasn't used to AND that they hadn't warned him about! Crazy story.
Thank God for him it seems like all the steps of dislodging from the seat and the parachute opening up was/is all automatic and it worked well. Otherwise, I'm not sure he would've had the wherewithal to do any of those additional steps considering the traumatic situation that must've been and all those things happening so fast. I hope his back is also ok. From what I hear of ejections, that rapid push on the spine creates quite the compression.
www.airforcetimes.com
