Once upon a time there was a fighter controller who managed to get a ride in a hawk during an 11 group AD exercise in the mid 1980's. (Please note this is a fictional tale. Any similarity with subjects and names mentioned above is purely coincidental). The controller wore thick glasses, so although he liked to think he could be a jet jocky one day, he had no chance. Anyway, the mission called for 2 x hawk to run a race track just off the coast and "hack" anything that flew through their area. At the end of the race track the 2 x hawks executed a cross over turn. (For the uninitiated, both turn towards each other to protect the "6 o clock of their mate) one goes high and the other low. Perfectly safe. In this case, our hero was calling out the range of the other hawk, and (so said the pilot afterwards) was underestimating the range by a factor of 10. Anyway suddenly the voice of the passenger went up by a couple of octaves and there was a loud bang and considerable buffet. The passenger had departed thinking there was about to be a collision. He was seen on a fully deployed parachute, and a may day was put out. In due course a S&R helicopter arrived and collected our hero, by now sitting in his little rubber raft.
Later in hospital, the tric-cyclist (well can you spell it!!!) said that although our hero claimed that "it just went off gov - honest" he had pulled the handle. His reasons were that normally, if a car passenger is involved in a crash, he has 2 or 3 seconds blacked out because he was not concentrating and things happend so fast. The driver however, often sees the same crash in slow motion because he can see it comeing, and is in adrenalin overload. Our hero could describe the whole thing in great detail (therefore knew what was happening) and the clincher was that he caught his pebble glasses in his hands as the seat accelerated up the rails and gravity pulled them off his face. As the hawk mk 10 seat only had one handle, and that between his legs, that is where his hands were and how he caught his glasses. However, as the seat was in the sea, this was only a guess. The navy sent a minesweeper for about a week, but the seat was not found. In the mean time, all the hawks and tornados were grounded as they all used the same seat, and it was just faintly possible that the seat did go off by itself (yer right)
Later our hero wrote an article in the in house fighter control newspaper and that upset just about anybody who had anything to do with the incident. I understand that our hero may have achieved a fairly senior rank in later years, but as I said, this is a fairy story, and I am making it all up.