Did you ever hear of a Goblin flaming-out for any reason other than no fuel ?
Yes; my bestest mate whilst I went through flying training. I was his best man and I went to his Golden Wedding in February.
He was doing circuits at Graveley, the relief landing ground for Oakington. He opened the throttle to overshoot, IIRC we had to preserve the tyres in the circuit, and the compressor detached itself from the main shaft and advanced through the intake assembly. This caused quite a commotion seeing that the fuel tank was directly in front of it. Our hero, on hearing the noise and all the red lights, looked in his rear view mirror into a ball of flame. Without further ado off came the canopy shortly followed by him. He could see downwards and he had this vision of two wingtips and a cockpit sticking out of a fiery mess.
He had left the aircraft at or below the seats limits, 200ft/90knots, but was probably saved by the fact that the aircraft was still climbing when he ejected. He landed on the runway with some horizontal velocity which also helped.
The aircraft then turned and went straight for ATC. I knew that something was wrong because I was on a QGH at the time and the controller's patter suddenly dried up. It landed on the signals square and there was a delay as the fire crew put the fire tender out. The now Black & White ambulance picked up the pilot and took him to Huntington Hospital. They suspected that he might have suffered a back injury and kept him on boards. After two days of extreme discomfort he was transferred to RAF Hospital Ely. There he was Xrayed and told to get up.
"Bbbbutt."
"Get up, nothing wrong with you"
About five years later I went back to Graverley, then abandoned, to do the helicopter sequence for the film 'Robbery'. I had a poke about the old signals square and there were still some old control wires tangled up in the grass..
Apart from that never any trouble.