Resurrecting the dead thread...
Hello all,
I found this thread looking for a blog entry on my site and had to hop in, even though it is a little stale. The topic is one close to my heart. I have great respect for all personnel who have to work in dangerous jobs, including EMTs and other first responders, as well as military personnel. Many occupations in both have more hazards than the average person realizes.
Ejection seats for example. They can be considered to be weapons capable of propelling a 350-450lb multi-part projectile to a height of at least 100ft above ground, and in some cases much higher. Their destructive power should not be underestimated.
Maintainance and/or ground mishap ejections have occurred many times over the years, with actually the first US Army ejection being one out of a Heinkel cockpit being prepped for shipping to the US. They are often fatal, but even the non-fatal ones often leave devastating injuries. I have seen photos of a F-4 Phantom Mk H7AF ejection seat sitting on the roof of a hanger (corrugated steel construction) near the bent metal hole where it had exited the roof. I have spoken to people who have had to clean up the wreckage of an A-4 Skyhawk 'hot seat' ejection where three people were killed by the ejection and rocket blast. I know of a Phantom ejection where a crew chief was killed lowering the seat bucket onto a circuit breaker panel placed under the seat temporarily as he replaced the battery of the aircraft. The panel shorted against the underseat rocket and ignited it.
As to the A-6 BN who partially ejected, his seat did not actually fire. It suffered a fatigue crack in the top latch window which allowed the seat to lift up in the cockpit during a negative G maneuver. The seat moved enough that the trip rods for the time release mechanism and drogue gun were pulled. This allowed for the seat to execute the post ejection deployment of the drogue chutes, and then after a very short delay released the drogues to withdraw the main parachute and unlatch the crewman from the seat. The parachutes (drogues or main or both) pulled the seat up the rails and partly out of the cockpit before pinning the seat back against the rear of the cockpit. The main chute streamed along the fuselage and entangled the horizontal stabilizer. This luckily did not effect controllability, but it managed to act as a restraint system, pinning the crewman to his seat by his parachute harness. (His hips were released by the lap belt being released, but he was connected to the survival kit in the seat pan and that kept him in the seat and upright.) Thanks to his pilot, and the carrier crew, he was not further injured in his landing thanks to that miraculous entanglement keeping him from being impaled on the shards of the canopy that were left in front of him.
One of the questions I'd like to answer is about repairing the aircraft after a ground ejection. It happens, and often is within reason financially. The major damage often has to do with the rocket blast during the seat firing. I am about to post a photo on my site from last years CF-18 ejection that shows the rocket efflux spilling out of the cockpit as the pilot's feet clear the canopy bow. I would rank this photo as literally the best ejection photo I have ever seen, and I have literally hundreds of test ejection photos and films in my collection.
One person I spoke to listed to me the amount of repairs done to a cockpit after a maintainance mishap. He said besides replacing the canopy and seat (with all the aforementioned replacement parts from a prior post) they had to replace all the cockpit instruments and controls, remove all the interior panels and inspect/repair all the damage done underneath them from rocket blast, and replace sections of the aircraft skin behind the cockpit. It was about $500,000 as I recall not including the seat and canopy costs. For an $18million bird, that is not bad.
One last comment. The comment about the smear on the ceiling was rather apt. One Navy AME told me that after a ejection mishap on the hanger deck they took care of the killed AME by 'painting over the dent in the hanger ceiling.' Very sad.
Take care if you ever come across a seat, even a very old one. Like many stories of antique ammo or grenades being found, ejection seats can harbor live cartridges after years. Even ejected seats often have backup charges that are not fired. One ACES II from an F-16 I know of was recovered after five years and had two live cartridges. One would be able to fire a 1lb slug out the back of the seat to withdraw the drogue parachutes.
Kevin
