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Ejection Seat: Difference between revisions
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*** 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.
** There's a close up photo of F-16 ejection at Mountain Home airshow in 2003. [//www.aerospaceweb.org/aircraft/fighter/f16/pics03.shtml] [//fearoflanding.com/accidents/ejection-0-8-seconds-before-impact/] — note the pyrotechnics. At which point the photographer finally realized that there's an aircraft (now certainly uncontrolled) apparently flying straight at him and it's evacuation time. The pilot (Captain Chris Stricklin) managed to steer away from the crowd, but not pull up, and ejected 0.8 second before crash (didn't even ram the observation tower in which the photo was taken, and walked away with minor injuries, so the only loss was the plane itself). He had to leave the stunt squadron after this, but in 2009 got an award for good work on safety programmes.
* [[Tom Wolfe]], in ''[[The Right Stuff]]'',
* 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.
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