JULY 2018JULY 2018 AH 59returned to flight status 10 months after
his crash. He was lucky: The windblast
killed White instantly.S
upersonic planes are easier to
design than supersonic ejection
systems. The three-seat Mach
2 B-58 Hustler used individual,
enclosed escape capsules to protect its
occupants (see P. 72). Its replacement, the
General Dynamics F-111, was to have
ejected the entire cockpit, but such sys-
tems were so complicated, expensive and
heavy that they were discarded.
Ejection seats have saved lives right up
to the very edge of space. On April 16,
1975, Captain Jon T. Little was knocked
out while ejecting from a Lockheed U-2R
spyplane over the Pacific at 65,000 feet
and 470 mph. Unconscious, he fell 50,000
feet before his parachute automatically
deployed. “I pulled the eject handle,” he
recalled, “and the next thing I remember
I was in the water.”
On January 25, 1966, Lockheed test
pilot Bill Weaver and backseater Jim
Zwayer suffered a flameout in their
SR-71’s right engine and immediately
lost control. “I didn’t think the chances
of surviving an ejection at Mach 3.18 and
78,800 ft. were very good,” Weaver said.
“...I learned later the time from event
onset to catastrophic departure from con-
trolled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying
to communicate with Jim, I blacked out,
succumbing to extremely high g-forces.
The SR-71 then literally disintegrated
around us. From that point, I was just
along for the ride.”
Weaver’s pressure suit inflated, pre-
venting his blood from boiling and the
wind from tearing him apart. Because of
the thin atmosphere at its operating alti-
tude, a Blackbird flying faster than 2,000
mph encounters wind force equivalent to
about 460 mph down below, but the air
is also too thin to prevent a parachutist
from spinning or tumbling so fast as to
suffer injury. With Weaver unconscious,
his Lockheed RQ201 seat automati-
cally deployed a drogue chute to pre-
vent spin, and popped the main chute at
15,000 feet just as Weaver came around.
Unfortunately, Zwayer died of a broken
neck during the aircraft breakup.
Test pilot Bill Park pushed it to the very
edge of height, speed and luck, as the only
man to eject from the Blackbird twice. In
July 1964, after a Mach 3 test flight, his
controls locked up on approach to GroomTECH NOTES
Lake. Park punched out only 200 feet up
in a 45-degree bank. Two years later, he
and backseater Ray Torick were attempt-
ing to release a top-mounted D-21 drone
at Mach 3.2 when it pitched down and
broke their Blackbird in half. G-forces
within the tumbling nose section pinned
Park and Torick in their seats, unable
even to reach their ejection handles, until
it slowed in lower, thicker air, where they
punched out safely and landed in the
Pacific. Tragically, Torick’s pressure suit
took in water and he drowned.
But that wasn’t his seat’s fault. Today
Martin-Baker alone counts more than
7,500 lives saved by their ejection seats,including over 3,300 Americans. (The
company’s Ejection Tie Club is limited
to aviators saved by its seats; members
worldwide receive a distinctive tie, tiepin,
cloth patch, certificate and membership
card.) Yet the ejection seat, which argu-
ably made jet combat possible, may
eventually end up a footnote in aviation
history. If the drone revolution does away
with onboard aircrews, what they sat on
will become a museum curiosity.For further reading, frequent contributor Don
Hollway recommends: Eject!, by Bill Tuttle;
Punching Out, edited by James Cross; and
OPPOSITE BOTTOM & RIGHT: MARTIN-BAKER; OPPOSITE TOP: NATIONAL ARCHIVES ejectionsite.com.
ANATOMY OF AN
EJECTION SEAT
Martin-Baker’s US16T
ejection seat was
selected in June 2005
to upgrade the escape
system in the Northrop
T-38C Talon advanced
trainer. It features an
automatically deployed
seat survival kit and life
raft, and can be used
at up to 50,000 feet
altitude and 600 knots
indicated airspeed.