Excuse me for butting in again, I'm just wondering about the workings of the modern ejector seats. How far does the seat pan handle have to move before firing the seat?
I know someone who was sitting on a Mk10 seat similar to this in a Tornado when they had a hydraulic failure that meant taking the over-run cable (as they were too heavy to take the threshold cable). On touchdown he said to himself that if they didn't take the cable that he would punch them out as otherwise they would have a seriously bumpy ride through the rocks of the desert beyond the end of the runway. As he watched the arrestor gear go past him on either side of the runway with no feeling of retardation he reached down and pulled the ejection handle that left it's housing in the seat - at the same time the hook and cable started doing their job of bringing the jet to an abrupt halt and forcing the handle back into the seat housing! He now didn't know if the seat was going to fire or not and had to go through some very thorough checks with the safety pins/command eject lever to try and ensure it didn't subsequently go off. The hardest choice was opening the canopy because if the seat went off at this point before the armourer had done more checks and put more safety interlocks in place then the guy on the seat would most certainly collect the canopy after a very short 25g acceleration.
So in short - you do have to pull the bang seat handle pretty hard on the Mk 10 seats...
LJ