Originally Posted by
QDM360
Well, no. But taking off from runway 09, an ejection straight ahead would have sent the jet to downtown Kamloops. Lots of houses everywhere. I can understand that the pilot was looking for an alternate option and trying to steer the jet away from the inhabited areas.
I strapped into my first ejection seat equipped aircraft back in 1965. Since then I have NEVER heard any pilot or backseater talk about not ejecting promptly in order to avoid a populated area. Of course normal flight planning tries to avoid flying over houses to reduce noise pollution and/or keep from dropping bombs and stuff in Aunt Maud's back yard, and so on. If there is a town some distance off the end of a runway, I imagine the person writing the departure procedure would take that into account so that a normal departure would include a turn. That is generally the case for both military and civilian flying.
Generally speaking, you don't want to eject unless you have to. It's dangerous, it hurts, and there is a lot of paperwork associated with any ejection. However, when it IS time to eject........... well...... you EJECT and you don't want to waste a millisecond because doing so might get you killed. It's that simple.
And in this case, it looks like the plane actually crashed in somebody's front yard, the pilot ended up on a roof, and the passenger not far away.
The idea of sacrificing yourself on the off chance that you might steer away from a school yard is a myth perpetrated by an uneducated media.