Little more than a month after Pearl Harbor,
when the United States was belatedly gearing up
for war, Germany was already testing jet fighters.
In January 1942, Heinkel company test pilot
Helmut Schenk flew an He-280 prototype with
four pulse-jet engines. They didn’t provide enough
power for takeoff, so the Heinkel was tethered to
an He-111 tow plane. Unfortunately, that kicked
up so much snow that when Schenk reached 7,900
feet and the bomber crew dropped the heavy tow-
line, it remained frozen to his jet. Flying, let alone
landing, was impossible, but luckily Heinkel was
also working on another innovation. “I jettisoned
the canopy and then pulled the release lever for
the seat,” Schenk recalled, “and was thrown clear
of the aircraft without coming in contact with it.”
A blast of compressed air fired him, seat and all,
out of the cockpit. He landed unharmed via para-
chute, the first man to escape an aircraft using an
ejection seat.
Almost since airplanes started flying, people
have been figuring the quickest way to get out whenthey fail. Bungee-cord and compressed-air escape
systems date back to the 1910s. By September
1941, the Germans were test-firing dummies from
the back seat of a Junkers Ju-87. Early ejection
seats had difficulty just clearing the Stuka’s tail
fin. As aircraft speed and required ejection power
increased, air bottles became impractically heavy;
instead the He-162 jet’s seat used a gunpowder
cartridge. It’s thought some 60 Luftwaffe pilots
ejected during the war, but how many actually
survived is unknown.
In Britain, during an emergency landing in a
fighter prototype he co-designed with Irish engi-
neer James Martin, test pilot Captain Valentine
Baker was unable to bail out in time. Martin took
his partner’s death so hard that he repurposed their
company toward aircrew escape. In July 1946,
Martin-Baker employee Bernard Lynch ejected
from the rear cockpit of a Gloster Meteor 3 at 320
mph, and eventually made 30 more successful ejec-
tions. “From an engineering point of view,” com-
pany spokesman Brian Miller said decades later,“ZERO-ZERO” SEAT
EJECTION SEQUENCE
Martin-Baker test-fires
its US16E seat from a
mocked-up cockpit of
Lockheed Martin’s
F-35 joint strike fighter.
IF NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF
INVENTION, COMBAT IS ITS FATHER.
THIS YEAR’S MODEL
During a ground test,
a Martin-Baker Mark
16 blasts off through
the canopy of Textron
Airland’s Scorpion
light attack aircraft.