Belgian F-16 pilot rescued from power line after emergency ejection A Belgian F-16 fighter jet pilot has been rescued from a power line after getting into difficulties and ejecting from his stricken aircraft. The two-seat jet, which appeared to be on a routine and unarmed flight, was flying between Belgium and a French naval aviation base when it came down between Pluvigner and Landaul in …
Not a bad idea, but one button only is safer and more reliable: you don't want to be fumbling about trying to figure out which button is which or debating about how much time you've got left when you've really only got a split second. One button is also less complex than having a dual-mode ejection seat, so less likely to fail in an emergency.
Well, you're choosing to go up[0] while the plane is going forward[1], and you will lose forward speed the moment you're out of the cockpit. Which means that you have to be clear of the tail the moment it passes under[2] you, and preferably with some margin. If not you may well have a *much* shorter spine due to it being fragmented because of a collision with a bit of metal sticking up[3] at the back of the plane you just chose to get out of.
[0] relative to the plane. Might well be down relative to the earth.
[1] more or less.
[2] see [0]
[3] see [0] once more
ISTR that the F-111 had a load of avionics in the cockpit roof so the seats fired downwards. 111 pilots were drilled in half-rolling the aircraft before pulling the ejection lever until it became an automatic reaction. This to ensure that low-level bangouts didn't result in firing the crew into the turf as the 111 was often used in a TERCOM guided, low-approach role.
It took the USAF a while to figure out why there was a noticeable spike in fatalities amongst pilots ejecting at low altitude on other aircraft types....(!)
The F-111 cockpit with all of it's avionics ejected from the aircraft with both pilots. There were a few survivable ejections, those that did not survive was due to the ejection sequence being initiated in an out of envelope configuration. There were several RAAF fatalities in the F-111, of those only one was initiated when the aircraft was in an unsurvivable attitude due to a bird strike on the windshield at low altitude.
The ejection seat in question is known as a zero/zero seat (a safe ejection can be made from a stationary aircraft on flat ground - zero altitude, zero speed).
Earlier ejection seats (such as those in the now long retired Sea Vixen and Buccaneer) required a minimum forward speed (90 knots IIRC) at zero altitude for a safe ejection.
It has a rocket pack beneath the seat (as indeed all modern fighter aircraft do) which engages when the base of the seat passes the cockpit sills which will easily push the seat (and occupant) well clear of the tail.
In this particular aircraft, the seats are also angled outward slightly by the trajectory divergence rocket (so the two occupants do not collide) if they happen to eject such that they would try to occupy the same physical space.
"It is unknown whether the pilot's colleagues have given him the new callsign Sparky."
A friend suffered a similar fate when we (and others) were skydiving together. I made it back to the DZ and he wrapped himself around a power line and caused a lovely blue and rather large spark. His nickname is now "Flash".
Depending on how large the debris field is from the crash, you could well need a few hundred police/security personnel out there to secure it all, partly to stop people making off with souvenirs and partly to protect the genpub from getting too close to something that might do them some real harm, before you even then start thinking about how many more you'd need to do the more routine police-type activities - e.g. directing traffic away from the area, door-to-door property visits to evacuate any other local residents - that any major incident like this could involve.
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