The potential danger of such a situation is obvious; as one scrambled into the right hand seat it would have been possible to grab a handhold and inadvertently fire the damned thing! And there was no red safety disc and removable pin to guard against such a catastrophe. No, I am as certain as I could be, that there were no such seats fitted in that particular aircraft.
(The above from my post #13)
I have just recalled a further relevant point tending to confirm there were no bang seats in the T4 I flew in. In 1956, the year before my flight, our CCF annual camp was at RAF Andover. One of the "treats" for us was a day trip in trucks to what was then RAF Wroughton, Wiltshire (now part of the Imperial War Museum or the Science Museum, I forget which).
At that time, the hangars were absolutely chock-full of a fascinating array of aircraft as a sort of
ad hoc museum. We sat in a Fieseler
Storch, a Japanese rocket-powered fighter, a Wellington cockpit, and so on. One of the exhibits was the fuselage of a Canberra,
fitted with bang seats. These
had red painted steel discs attached to pins to guard against accidental firing (though obviously the seats were not still loaded with cartridges!). Well, the inevitable happened, one of the idiots in our party decided to pinch one of these as a "souvenir". This probably happened often, so someone checked and noticed it was missing before we left. We were kept waiting in the back of the lorry by our highly embarrassed officer, who threatened we would be kept there until the culprit owned up.
To cut a long story short ("too late", did someone say?), the red-faced berk who had it eventually handed it back, and if looks could have killed on the way back, he wouldn't have survived the journey! (We were from a highly respected Grammar school, oh, the shame!!)
So the following year, the appearance of a Martin Baker bang seat would have been indelibly etched on my memory, and no mistake ....
