Ejection Seat: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

{{quote|'''Q:''' Now this I'm particularly proud of. You see the gear-stick here? Now if you take the top off, you'll find a little red button. Whatever you do, don't touch it.

'''Q:''' Because if you do, you'll release this section of the roof, and engage and fire the passenger ejector seat. ''Whoosh!''

'''James Bond:''' Ejector seat? You're joking!

 

 

It should be pointed out that shooting an airman after he or she's ejected is a war crime, though this is a relatively recent idea and wasn't in force until 1977.<ref>Yes, it doesn't make much sense when you think about it. Can you imagine anyone letting a crewman jump out of his tank, wrap a bit of silk around himself and walk away from the battle? Perhaps the most bizarre example of this is that if you shoot down a plane carrying paratroops (who are not granted the same protection), you ''can'' shoot at the parachuting soldiers, but shooting at the plane's actual aircrew is a war crime. Erm... The technical answer is that an airman without a plane is no longer unable to discharge his or her functions and is therefore ''Hors de combat'', whereas paratroops are still able to do some damage. (Tank crews, though...)</ref>

 

Distinct from just Abandon Ship; rather than just getting the heck out of (the) Dodge, a machine's helping you out (the door).

 

* ''[[Code Geass]]'' has ejector seats as a major feature of the Knightmare Frames. In fact, according to [[All There in the Manual|the backstory]], this trope is the very reason Knightmares exist to begin with.<ref>Britannia looked into putting Ejector Seats in traditional war machines like tanks, but then they added legs so they could escape the battlefield and it kind of snowballed from there</ref> The fact that the [[Super Prototype|Lancelot]] doesn't have one is made out to be a big deal.

** [[Failsafe Failure]] is mostly averted, but there are a couple of moments. In one episode, we see a character ({{spoiler|Kewell}}) die when the [[Super Prototype|Guren Mk-II's]] radiant wave fries his machine's internal computers. In another, Lelouch is badly injured because the seat activates when he doesn't have a clear vector of escape, making it bounce off the ground and nearby objects like a rubber ball; it's frankly quite amazing that he didn't get whiplash.

* [[Axis Powers Hetalia|Italy and Poland]] both of them used it in different moments. Sadly, they got stuck in a tree immediately after.

 

* Given its appearance in no fewer than two other media, it is a pretty safe assumption that every iteration of [[Batman|the Batmobile]] has an ejector seat.

** The same goes for the [[Cool Plane|Batplane/Batwing]].

* In ''[[Green Lantern]]'', an airplane went down and Hal Jordan thought that maybe the pilot had forgotten where the lever was. He himself had managed to persuade Kyle Rayner to take a flight—without his ring—and after Kyle had double-checked everything, he had asked how to trigger the ejection seat, and Hal hadn't remembered.

* In one ''[[Archie]]'' comic book, Jughead as Captain Hero faces a courteous villain who left his own car via ejection seat, while the car is in motion.

 

== Films -- Animation ==

* At the beginning of ''[[The Incredibles]]'', Mr Incredible uses the ejector seat to get Buddy out of his car.

* ''[[Yellow Submarine]]''. Ringo is steering the sub as they pass through the Sea of Monsters. Old Ferd tells him "Whatever you do, [[Schmuck Bait|don't touch that button]]." Of course Ringo does so, and is ejected out of the submarine.

 

== Films -- Live-Action ==

{{quote|"This is the end of Devil 505, say goodbye asshole! Eject eject eject!"

"Goodbye asshole!" *ejection seats fire* }}

 

== Literature ==

* Averted in ''[[The Laundry Series|The Jennifer Morgue]]'' by [[Charles Stross]], which goes into some detail as to why an ejection seat in a car is an insanely bad idea; when Bob Howard presses the eject button on his [[Cool Car]], the ''entire car ejects'', which is only slightly less so. It's made clear that only time you should press the button is if ''not'' pressing it is ''definitely'' going to kill you. The explanation also deflates the idea of the "easy eject"; Bob describes how, due to the G-forces involved, the pilot is likely looking at weeks in traction ''at best''.

* As in the games on which they're based, the ''[[Wing Commander (novel)|Wing Commander]]'' novels occasionally feature ejection seats. In ''End Run'', it's noted that there's a mechanism that's supposed to prevent an ejection while on the carrier, but that has a reputation for not always functioning. [[Chekhov's Gun|Later in the novel]] it fails for one pilot, smashing him against the landing bay overhead.<ref>for those not familiar with naval terminology, the ceiling</ref>

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* When Wendy Watson flies to rescue ''[[The Middleman]]'', [[Ridiculously Human Robot|IDA]] triggers the Middlejet's Ejection Seat remotely, much to Wendy's horror.

* Fighters in ''[[Babylon 5]]'' are often equipped with ejector seats, though rescue is a bit of a crapshoot in space.

{{quote|'''Harm:''' "Punching out is the last thing a pilot ever wants to do. People think you get in trouble, pull the magic handle, and float safely to the ground? Every time you punch out you end up an inch shorter."}}

 

 

== Tabletop Games ==

 

== Western Animation ==

* ''[[Batman: The Animated Series]]'' examples:

** The animated Batmobile ''does'' have ejector seats, as evidenced in [[Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?|the episode with Earl Cooper]].

* Batman in ''[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold|Batman the Brave And The Bold]]'' has an ejector seat in the Batplane. He hovered a finger over the button because Plastic Man was getting on his nerves.

* The first season finale of ''[[Megas XLR]]'' features one of these, with the button "Bet You Can't Guess What This Button Does". Next season, there was an "Eject Skippy" button, conveniently anticipating where the annoying kid would be sitting.

* In real life, 20% of aircraft ejections result in the pilot sustaining career-ending injuries, such as death. Also, 100% of aircraft ejections result in the pilot losing several inches of height, due to the sudden compression of being flung out of your plane at anywhere from 12 to 22 Gs (depending on what ejection seat your plane was equipped with). Most air forces impose a career limit on the number of ejections permissible before it's desk job city for you.

** Indeed pilots don't eject at the first hint of trouble, either. Considerable effort if first put into ''slowing the aircraft'' because at supersonic or just plain fast speeds the wind the pilot is slamming into could possibly rip the mask off of a pilot's face and ram the air down his esophagus, [[Squick|inflating his stomach like a balloon]], which makes simply impacting the ground sans parachute sound like a better option. Slowing down to a more reasonable speed to eject into is a good idea, if you can do it. A 200&nbsp;mph wind is about the fastest nature throws at us. 600&nbsp;mph is ''unnatural''. The conventional wisdom among pilots is to eject only if not ejecting ''will'' kill you.

** Before ejection seats were invented, escaping an aircraft by "bailing out" was even more dangerous. If you were lucky, there was a control that would blast off the canopy with explosive charges. If not, you had to open the canopy yourself, either climb out or roll the aircraft over and ''fall'' out, and essentially perform an impromptu skydive. Unlike a normal skydive however, the aircraft is likely to be violently spinning and rapidly losing altitude due to loss of engines, control surfaces, entire wings, or all of the above. If the plane was flying low enough or couldn't be controlled at all, many pilots chose to stay in their planes and die instantly in the crash instead of risk bailing out and dying a slower, more horrible death. At least 50% died on the way out (not counting the ones who didn't make it out at all), and only around a quarter made it back home safely, the rest of the survivors either being taken prisoner or horribly wounded. Early-model Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Bell P-39 Airacobras were notoriously difficult to bail out of because the wind would literally hold the side-folding canopy shut, making it almost impossible to escape the plane.

*** Production Airacobras didn't have sliding canopies, they had ''doors'', but that didn't make them easier to bail out, for a different reason. The relative positions of the cockpit door and the stabilizer effectively made sure that if any pilot taller than a midget would forget to take a fetal position after bailing out, his legs will be broken by a stabilizer, this usually being a career ending injury even if the pilot managed to land on his own territory and was saved by the groung troops. More than a few pilots suffered such a misfortune, the most famous of them being a Soviet ace Boris Glinka (29 victories).

*** The Lockheed P-38 Lightning, likewise, had a nasty habit of killing or permanently injuring anybody attempting to bail out of it. The plane basically had 2 fuselages, with a boomlike horizontal stabilizer stretching the entire width between them. Bailing out of the cockpit (located in the middle between the 2 fuselages) would likely slam you into the boom, whether you curled into a fetal position or not. Rumor has it that it was this plane that inspired the invention of the ejection seat in the first place.

* Ejection system are attached to manned space launchers to blast the manned bit clear if the launcher is danger of exploding on the launchpad. This has only ever been used once for real, when the two-man crew of Soyuz T-10-1, waiting for a trip to Salyut 7 in 1983, were ejected clear of their launcher just before a fire destroyed it.

* In 1975, another Soyuz mission had its capsule ejected while heading for orbit as the third stage was deviating too much.