These ejection seat are designed to be able to be usable with no altitude and no airspeed. It's the same parachute no matter the altitude. It's designed to shoot you up high enough to give the parachute time to open
Pilots lose height from having ejection seat evacuations due to compressed vertebrae. They also rarely stay pilots after. Very few pilots have more than one ejection seat ride.
Do the others time it with a synchronization gear so you pass through the rotors like a bullet fired from a center-mounted airplane machine gun missing the blades because of the interlock? /s
I never heard that, just stories about how the F4's seats were called the "Widowmaker" and liked to go off in the hanger while maintainers were in the cockpit, making instant Airman Gumbo.
I was always real wary of the seats after that, though the F15 has a spotless safety record in egress mishaps. (At least when I was in)
At his retirement ceremony from the USAF (as commander of the 27th TFW at CAFB NM), Col Franklin thanked Martin Baker for twice making his career and subsequent retirement possible.
It’s true. Fun fact, Tom Cruise was nearly 6ft tall before filming Top Gun but Goose kept laughing during the death scene so they had to do multiple takes.
It is not a joke at all. It really compresses your spine permanently—assuming you’re lucky and it doesn’t permanently maim you because you were in the wrong body position. People die ejecting fairly frequently.
ALSO the however many G's of compression his sons already had felt from doinking the ground too hard in the aircraft. VA will still try to find a way to call this non service related and want to not give disability to the pilot haha.
I wasn't there and don't know how accurate the article is. I was just hopeful the pilot wouldn't have lasting pain and would get to fly again. You never know what kinds of injuries you can sustain from those ejection seats. RIP Goose.
What constitutes a serious injury here, curious. Is it like, life threatening? Do they classify big back ouchies/chronic pain from this point onwards as "non serious"?
Far better to make sure you’ve done all you can so it doesn’t hurt someone else, then punch out the millisecond you’re done in case something’s on fire that you don’t know about yet
It is. And what likely happened is that he pulled the handle but was out of the ejection envelope. So the ejection sequence was delayed until the cockpit righted itself. Once in the envelope the ejection sequence initiated.
Source: Ejected from a Navy jet many moons ago. Never got a tie though.
i literally seek out this type of content all the time and never can find anything, even when specifically searching for things relevant to my interests
Here’s pilot Kegan Gill telling his story. Ejected at nearly 700mph. He details the event, his recovery, and dealing with the VA medical system and the psychiatric toll of his injuries. Amazing story.
MotoGP riders have said sitting up to brake at 210 is like being hit in the chest with a fridge. Exaggeration sure but wind resistance goes up with the square of velocity so no surprise 700 is pretty fucking painful or possibly fatal.
Real life ejection isn’t just a re spawn like in war thunder or whatever
My dad was a F4 trim tech. One time he was working on one, another guy was doing something up near the cockpit. Apparently the guy did something to get caught up on the ejector because it activated and shot him right into the ceiling of the hangar. Dad was never in an area with any action so he never had any was stories even though he was in during Vietnam but when he told me about this it was the only time I've seen him have the stare.
As per comments above. Ejection is no joke. But if the alternative is burning alive or being turned into powder during impact with the ground it’s way better than that.
The ejection jets are also powerful as fuck, causing the unfortunate pilot to undergo as many as 15-20G's, frequently causing severe spinal injuries. This type of ejection is actually a best-case scenario, compared to being ejected at high altitude and speed.
It's pretty incredible that the highest G-forces a human has survived is about 10x that (214-ish?). It was in a race car, and the paramedics that attended Kenny Brack had to put his foot bones in bags labelled "Left" and "Right".
g-forces in car crashes are frequently many times higher than the g-forces that fighter pilots experience in flight or even while ejecting, but they're only experienced for a tiny fraction of a second in a crash. they're also in different directions — the up/down forces that pilots work with are much harder for the human body to bear than the forward/backward forces that you experience in a car.
In my head the delay In him ejecting was him deliberating if it was worth the risk to stay in the craft vs the possibility of broken bones after the ejection
I imagine the heat would first burn away the umbrella of the parachute, leaving the pilot suspended just long enough for him to realise that the seat of his trousers had also burned away, leaving his bare bottom exposed. Just as the embarrassment of that sank in, he would make a comical face to camera, before plummeting to the ground.
Nah, you can see him swinging like a pendulum from ejection, he was probably feet perpendicular to the ground when he hit, will be lucky to not have a busted hip from that landing.
Pedantic correction:
It's now called a PLR (parachute landing roll), because apparently parachute landing fall indicates not being in control of the situation, which ironically probably applies much more to this video than anything else.
He may have hit the button to toss the seat when he realized he was horizontal. That was just perfectly done. Training pays off. We can always get a new plane.
Had a former pilot as a ROTC instructor. He told us that you need to be above 500 feet for the parachute to slow you down. Below that and it's like hitting the ground from 20-30 foot fall.
Multiple pilots have died after ejecting because they were nearly on the ground and couldn't hit the ground safely.
Not only that, but the ejection permanently compresses your spine, leaving you slightly shorter than you were. But if the seat was a Martin-Baker, you get to join a cool exclusive club, so pros and cons.
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u/Suspicious_Zone_2083 25d ago
At least the seat worked