What exactly happens when an ejection seat activates? I believe there’s some sort of explosion designed to hurl the pilot (and his seat) well clear of the cockpit. How far does it throw the pilot? In this case, with the ejection occurring on the ground, would it throw him far enough into the air that he’d be severely injured when he hit the ground?
Yes......................
The T-6 is equipped with a Zero-Zero ejection seat.
Even the best technology is not 100%. Prayer up for the family and everyone involved.
Just looking at it from the outside, I would say some maintenance guy’s stuff is in the wind. My son flew T-6s in pilot training too. I will ask him, to make sure, but I think the ejection seat, has streamers, which prevents it from being accidentally activated. The article doesn’t say, but it might have been a preflight thing, where he may have simply leaning over the cockpit. We simply don’t know, but it’s quite a jolt, when it goes off.
I did not work on Seats but had to attend classes because I worked in the cockpit. You are sitting on an explosive seat; on the flight line, they are fully armed, and a series of wire pins are the only thing between you and a bad day. The seat and LOX system were the only things that made me nervous working around jets. Lots of gruesome videos to watch in training.
I was a plane captain in the navy.
The last thing you do before the pilot gets into the aircraft, is unpin the seat.
The first thing you do when the pilot exits the aircraft is pin the seat.
This goes for back seaters too.
If the seat is pinned it cannot be manually activated.
This means a failure of the seat itself.
Not if the canopy was closed.
Ejection is designed to get you far enough from the plane to be safe. It has to be powerful enough to get aircrew over the tail that may be coming at you at mach speed, plus.
I heard stories of a suicide by ejection seat, inside a hangar. Even a low altitude ejection can be injurious if the seat’s parachute doesn’t have time to properly deploy. Ejection is a best-option in a worst case scenario.
Ejection seats can be lifesaving, or they can kill you.
Back when they were first used, they had a 155 mm (or perhaps a 105 mm) howitzer charge, and it was brutal. Pilots who ejected often had vertebrae in their back fractured or crushed from the abrupt force of the charge going off.
They soon developed rocket charges that would ignite, and the more gradual application of force was much better for the pilots, although other injuries still could and do occur.
There are generally two different forms of ejection:
One type involves handles over the head that the pilot reaches up and grabs with both hands to pull down and which would (I recall) pull a covering down over the face to help alleviate the sudden force of the wind stream, but this had the undesired possibile outcome of the arms, both extended up to grab the ejection handles, coming down awkwardly, elbows hitting the sides of the seat or the arms even going outside the seat causing broken bones or dislocations to the pilot’s upper extremities. Plus, there is lost time to reach up, or if a pilot is already injured, may not be able to. (I have often wondered if this is how McCain broke his shoulders when he ejected from his A-4 Skyhawk over North Vietnam.)
The other type involves a handle between the pilot’s legs which may be pulled up. This seems to be preferred unless a pilot is in a position to plan the ejection (such as in an event involving fuel exhaustion, etc.) where the pilot has time to think of it. This between the legs method is faster, involves less movement, and reduces the likelihood of upper extremity injuries.
Also, I don’t know if the over the head or between the legs selects an individual ejection or a command ejection. (someone else probably knows this, I cannot remember). If a plane has only one crew, there is no differentiation between a “individual” or a “command” ejection. You pull either one, you eject. However, in a plane with two or more crew, one person may initiate a “command” ejection, where EVERYONE gets ejected whether they want to or not. It is an interesting thing that, in multi-crew aircraft, crew members often discuss the option before they fly together, and leave the choice up to a specific person (either the pilot or RIO/Navigator) to choose, and to put their trust in that decision. I find that a fascinating thought process.
There exists the danger that someone may eject and the other one may not. In a famous case, a Navy RA-5 Vigilante doing reconnaissance over North Vietnam had a missile explode close aboard, and the crew member (aft of the pilot, IIRC) thought the plane had been hit and ejected. The plane had not been hit and the pilot landed safely on the carrier, but the guy who ejected was captured and became a POW.
By design, there are two different ways ejection occurs: First, he canopy is ejected and then the seats leave the plane (this is how “Goose” died in the first Top Gun movie where he hit the canopy) or secondly, the seats go right through the canopy, as hard as that is to believe.
I worked on A-7 Corsairs, and in that design, the seat went right through the canopy. When the pilot pulls the hands to eject, two spring loaded “hammers” on the top of the seat fly upward in a flash and break the canopy, and then the seat goes up through it. I found this hard to believe was a good thing, but we had a plane whose canopy had been badly scratched and scored during a difficult in-flight refueling in bad weather, but instead of just replacing it, they did a training exercise. The object was to verify the process of escaping the plane in a controlled crash if the canopy was stuck closed.
In the hangar bay, they seated a pilot in the plane in full flight gear and strapped in, helmet and all, and while we all watched, they started a timer and the pilot reached down, removed his survival knife (the ones with serrated edges), and with both hands, jabbed it forcefully upwards through the closed plexiglass canopy.
To my (our) astonishment, the blade went right through, and with a few pokes and sawing motions, the pilot was able to exit. (they had taken measures to ensure none of the plastic shards could become FOD (Foreign Object Damage) inside the complex cockpit by covering and taping things off, and stuffing rags in places. It was absolutely cool to watch. I had no idea.
They have multiple safety features on modern seats, both pins with streaming red flags on them, and what is called the “headknocker”. The “headknocker” was the LAST safety mechanism on the seat that would prevent it from firing.
When the pilot gets into the plane before flight, one of our jobs as Plane Captains was to remove the pins with the flags. We would hold them up (I seem to think there were two pins on the seat, but it has been a long time) for the pilot to see on the ground, he would acknowledge the removal with a nod and thumbs up, and then we would store the removed pins inside a compartment in the plane with the wheel and wing locks. (actually, I cannot now recall if the pins were stored in a bag in the cockpit or not...someone else here would be able to comment on that, I’m sure). Then, when we started up the plane, we would get the pilot’s attention, and pointing directly at the pilot, would make a chopping motion to the back of our own head. That was his signal to de-activate the “headknocker” which up to that point, had been irritatingly poking him in the back of his helmet. (Intentionally irritating him)
The pilot would reach up with one hand and stow the “headknocker” by folding it into the headrest behind his head and thumbs up would be exchanged.
The seat was fully armed at this point. It was vital to ensure both pins were removed and the “headknocker” was stowed. In an emergency, it would be impossible for the pins to be removed by the pilot, and the headknocker could not be stowed in time, and the pilot would likely be lost with the plane.
When the pilot landed, after his tail hook was disengaged from the arrestor cable, the first thing they would do when they reached their spot on the flight deck would be to deploy the headknocker to safe the seat. We would climb up and pin the seat. If I recall, this sequence was important, because they didn’t want the pilot to snag something climbing out of the cockpit and firing the seat.
Everyone took this very seriously. I cannot recall if this was on my ship or not, but on one of the carriers, an ejection seat had fired in the hangar bay, killing someone sitting in the seat. It had shot up and left a dent in an area in the overhead where the seat hit, killing the person sitting in it.
