Martin-Baker Ejection Seat Made Its First of 7,722 Saves 75 Years Ago Today
twz.com
twz.com
http://www.chuckyeager.org/news/sr-71-disintegrated-pilot-fr...
Minor nit pick, the pilot did not in fact eject. He was literally thrown out of the disintegrating aircraft, ripping his shoulder and waist harnesses in the process. Insane stuff, especially that he survived.
Were his knees bent the wrong way?
As an aside, the website (ejectionseat.com) is a trip itself.
Sad part of the story is that the other pilot of the original Blackbird incident didn't survive. The surviving pilot saw his companion's parachute and was thus (thinking that he survived) motivated to fight for his own life.
It's covered in logos that look like the ejection handle.
When I worked in the industry (electronics eng), I saw one in either a Jaguar or Tornado sim under construction and it had a brass plaque on the side naming the pilot and day of activation, along the lines of "On [DATE], [PILOT], ejected safely from their aircraft in this seat."
What's the risk calculus look like for a plane with an ejection seat vs. a plane without one? War obviously has one risk profile, but military vehicles and their operation differ wildly from day to day commercial operation.
Martin Baker's website is a bit wild, you can join their "tie club", but to do so you need to have ejected using their seat: https://martin-baker.com/tie-club/
And they list the ejections they know of https://martin-baker.com/ejection-notices/ , but the records are a bit jumbled, the latest entries include ejections in the past that they've discovered, and they don't all have dates, even "Someone successfully ejected today". Today when, man?!
There are a couple of pretty special pilot only watches. I like IWCs top gun too, the one with the real top-gun logo on only avialable to pilots that have graduated Top Gun.
Available to top gun graduates: https://www.iwc.com/content/iwc/americas/us/en/articles/jour...
The retail version: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.watche...
The people that actually get these watches don't seem to want to sell them, understandably.
They mention the B-2 as a platform, that one was the most expensive aircraft crash in history according to Wikipedia.
that's Zvezda K-36
I remember calculating a few years ago that more than 10% of the ejector seats sold by Martin-Baker have been used to eject.
Military aircraft operations, even in peacetime, are much more dangerous than the vast majority of civilian fixed-wing flight (except airshows/racing and maybe cropdusting). I don't know how much of that difference is the flight profile being inherently more dangerous (closer to terrain), and how much is it being harder on the aircraft.
Trainer jets like the L39 albatross have a less maneuverable design in exchange for being a lot more survivable in event of a problem. The engines themselves aren't that much less reliable - some engines like the Garrett TFE731 have a TBO of 4,000 hours which is significantly more than many GA engines like the Continental in an entry level Cessna.
That shouldn't be a big surprise: jet engines are turbines with basically only one moving part that just spins, whereas those crappy GA engines are reciprocating piston engines with designs that haven't changed since the 1950s.
With piston engines two engines failing is a completely reasonable thing which will sometimes happen to say, a transatlantic flight. In the early days of such travel, the demands are such that all the practical aeroplanes are four engine models anyway, so limping to an abort airfield on two engines was a reasonable strategy if two failed, but once jet engines on passenger planes were a thing, their enormous reliability makes this unnecessary hence TOPS and then ETOPS.
I know the US seats have started taking into account pilot weight to modulate thrust to limit the Gs to what is necessary
Cirrus also solves the other problem that's of growing importance in the US with increasingly elderly private pilots - what if your plane is fine but the pilot is incapacitated (e.g. stroke)? Emergency autoland means the plane itself is capable of determining a suitable landing site, navigating there, broadcasting its intentions to other aircraft and landing, then switching itself off, meaning the passengers (and possibly the pilot depending on what exactly was wrong) survive the incident.
https://www.aviationconsumer.com/safety/brs-parachute-retrof...
But I'll concede that article makes it clear this is a real thing non-crazy people do which I was not aware of.
"I never joke about my work, 007."