F-15C Activating Afterburners At Night

Reddit / u/Karibooooo

A Rare Occurrence

If you haven’t seen an F-15C’s afterburners at night, then you’ve been missing out. This F-15 Eagle fired up one of its afterburners after a round of maintenance at an American air base. 

This little demonstration was possible thanks to the “holdback tool” or the linkage between the anchor and tail hook. The ones found on this F-15 are rated at around 50,000 – enough to hold both engines with afterburners on. However, the crews are only supposed to do one at a time for safety purposes.

For protection, the ground maintenance crews had foam earplugs over their usual ear protection. Even then, the video uploader found the sound to be extremely loud up close.