Originally Posted by
Ascend Charlie
At the risk of heading for the sightboard, an ejection seat story. I was the Airmanship lecturer at 2FTS at the time, giving a lesson on the Martin-Baker Departure Lounge.For the ejection seat lessons, the best training aid was an actual seat, mounted on a rolling trolley. This enabled me to show how each of the timing systems was able to be armed and activated (to allow the seat to get clear of the fuselage, decelerate below 3g. and be below 10,000 feet) to open the parachute. Everything was present, except the explosive charges that fired it off.
After showing the class a film of how the seat works, and demos of strapping in and unstrapping, I called on a volunteer (“YOU! Get over here!”) and I ran through the strapping procedure again. This seat wasn’t particularly comfortable, but the longest flight was only 2 hours, so it was possible to tolerate it for that long.
The lucky volunteer had everything on except the helmet and oxy mask, so he was well trussed-up. The next part of the demonstration was for him to simulate ejection by reaching above his head for the ejection handles and pulling the face blind out and down over his face. When the blind reaches full extension and is covering the pilot’s face, the ejection sequence is triggered and (in a real seat) the first part of a three-part explosion is fired.
Well, in this case, the ground technicians who re-packed the seat after the last demonstration, put a small cartridge in the ejection gun. When the poor student pulled down on the face blind, there was an almighty BANG! which scared the crap out of everyone in the room, including me. And when the initial realisation came that the seat hadn’t actually launched through the roof, we all looked at the student, still with the blind over his face – slowly and shakily he lifted one edge of the blind and we saw a very white face emerge. Everybody broke up laughing, except him.
I hope you were all wearing hearing protection, hi vis vests, did an environmental impact study and had DVA on standby with PTSD claim forms pre-filled with applicant's details.....