Originally Posted by
Dune
- as you exit the seat a lanyard is attached to the harness which initiates chute deployment
I'd like to add a bit to Dune's excellent technical post on the ejection system. I'm no expert on military stuff though, only being a PPL / skydiver / trained aero engineer.
Modern military ejection systems -- for over 40 years -- tend to get the parachute out faster, by using some sort of mortar system to fire a slug to pull out drogue and/or extraction chutes and with the momentum at slow speeds also drag the canopy and lines out to full stretch. Or have the mortar or other pyrotechnic mechanism to throw the whole canopy away from the seat in a container. Designs differ between say ACES II and Martin Baker. Yeah I'm a little hazy on the details but that's roughly how it works. One can see it on various ejection seat videos online.
The "initiates chute deployment" that Dune talks about for the Tutor, that in contrast is old school seat technology: The pilot is wearing the parchute on their back, and initiation just means having the ripcord pulled. After which a spring loaded pilot chute jumps out, hopefully doesn't catch in the burble behind the person for more than a split second, catches air, and drags the main chute out from the apex. Basically like a skydiver from the 1960s. That's going to take longer than any modern system that gets the canopy and lines stretched out by pretty much pyrotechnic means at slower speed.
I haven't tried to analyze the videos frame by frame, but it took a while for the parts of the ejection sequence to happen. Even given the old technology, it seemed to take an awfully long time for any parachute to appear. Wish someone knew the timing of the Tutor's Weber seats, eg, how long from leaving the aircraft to the seat-man separation and parachute deployment initiation.
On one of the videos, I only saw a little bit of canopy start to partially inflate, for one person, just before they went behind the treeline.
NOT an impressive ejection, unlike say Anatoly Kvochur at the 1989 Paris airshow, or the CF-18 at Lethbridge Canada in 2010, with modern seats. Clearly there are many factors in this accident, not just the old seat design but the bad timing of the engine problem, stalling it out on the climb, and the ejection while low and headed steeply downhill.