Civilian passenger ejected from fighter

Civilian passenger ejected from a two seat French Rafale jet during takeoff

https://theaviationist.com/2019/03/21/civilian-passenger-ejected-from-a-two-seat-french-rafale-b-jet-during-take-off/?fbclid=IwAR2qMrD8XVhcMSsv7HDqnyGPnd7rvm25gsDJJbH-dsKy8G-fBy2FuPebP5E

 

At least the passenger is still alive. Hope he didn't accidentally touch the ejector handle.

 

Wow, I bet that was something he’ll never forget. Glad it sounds like he’s going to be ok.

 

Good thing the pilot had him select the ejection sequencer to only eject the back seat. If he had selected both, they would have both come out and the aircraft would have been lost.

When I rode with F-4, F-15 and F-16 pilots in the back seat, I always gave them the choice of what I selected in the back. They all said if I was scared enough to eject, they wanted to go, too. A little difference between a Fighter Weapon School guy in the back and a 64 year old civilian, though.

 

Sounds like it was an uplifting experience

 

Lucky he wasn't in a F-104

 

Didn't B52's go out the bottom too?

 

The navigator and bombardier went out the bottom, the pilot and copilot went out the top. I did the assy drawings of the blow off ejection hatches of the upper two positions. A 20mm cannon cartridge blew the torque shafts around to unlock the panel and raise the front edge to get it blown off by the air flow. Then the seat and the occupant came through.

 

Curious Bob, were the four of them split in two and sent seperate ways so they wouldn't collide upon ejection?

 

The crews were not elbow to elbow and as I remember it, the pilot and copilot went straight up and out of the opening. The navigator and bombardier went out of the bottom the same way. Again, if I remember, the seats in the lower deck tipped forward before they were ejected. If one studies the video of Bud Holland's debacle in Spokane you might be able to see the copilot eject before the airplane impacted. It appears that he came very close to hitting the vertical fin. Didn't matter, he went into the fireball anyway. There are current photos of B-52's from above and forward that shows the two ejection hatches but now they have skylights in them.

 

The later models have two more crew positions on the upper deck, ECM operator and the tail gunner (no longer isolated in the pressurized capsule in the tail). They eject upward, also. At one time on the early models their space was a fuel deck.

 

Bob- With the latest updates coming on the H models, they will be back to 3 or 4 total, not sure which. Modernizing the nav system allowed fewer navs.

Incidentally, USAF stopped allowing visitors to sit in ejection seat aircraft at airshows quite a while ago after several accidents. Survival rate not too good when you are not strapped into the seat.

 

What about the Navy? I sat in an A-7 at the now-defunct NAS Cecil Field at an airshow in 1972 or so.

 

No one made it out, that was only the co-pilot's hatch that ejected; he never made it out at all... here's a pic from Wiki...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fairchild_Air_Force_Base_B-52_crash#/media/File:FairchildB52Crash.jpg

There are videos of the whole stupid thing, the hatch came off just a second before the fireball.

 

Jim- Not sure about the Navy and whether it was just the AF or DOD-wide.

 

Thanks, I revisited the video late last night and I stand corrected. I hadn't thought about this for quite a while and I remembered that it was the hatch, not the copilot.

 

Thanks, Taz. I haven't kept informed about the latest mods to the B-52. I'm trying to keep up with the latest mods to my old airframe...93 coming up soon. "D" check....in progress.

 

Bob- It is hard to keep up with what the AF is doing to the B-52 because they have been changing their minds so much. They have now decided they will replace all eight turbofans with modern engines and keep the BUFFs until they are at least 100 years old. The B-21 will not replace them.

 

The Navy doesn't even keep ships that long. Well, except for one.

 

Brian- Yup, Old Ironsides has been around a while.

 

What an amazing airplane! And to think that I worked on the XB-52, YB-52, and the B-52A &B. I'm not too familiar with thrust ratings of the new fans but I'l bet that they could eliminate 6 of those 8 little engines and hang two big ones or maybe 4. A lot of expensive engineering involved, tho.

 

Thanks Bob, very interesting and informative as always. I'm going to check out that video you mentioned

 

Shoot, they could easily go from 8 to 4 engines and still be way more power than the existing planes....

 

You would have to put roller skates on the bottom of the engine nacelles, though. Not enough ground clearance and that is one reason they abandoned that idea. Pretty easy with eight new ones, though.

 

Roller skates? Well, the B-47 had the outriggers mounted under the inboard nacelles but those engines were only about two feet in diameter.