#ejection seat

Photos that record the testing of an ejection seat for the Fw 190. The testing was carried out on Fw 190 A-0/U4 No. 0022A SB+IB January 1944 at Langenhagen.

F-106 "A" Type Ejection Seat. ca. 1961

"The first two shuttles, Enterprise and Columbia, were built with ejection seats. These two vehicles were intended to be part of the shuttle test program and would fly with a crew of two test pilots or astronauts. Subsequent shuttles Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour were built for operational missions with a crew of more than two, including seats in the lower deck, and ejection seat options were deemed to be infeasible.

The type used on the first two shuttles were modified versions of the Lockheed SR-71 seat. The approach and landing tests flown by Enterprise had these as an escape option, and the first four flights of Columbia had this as a crew abort option as well.

With STS-5 marking the end of Columbia's test flight program, and as an operational mission with four crew members, the two cockpit ejection seats had their rocket motors removed for the flight. Columbia's next flight (STS-9) was likewise flown with the seats disabled in this manner. By the time Columbia flew again (STS-61-C, launched on January 12, 1986), it had been through a full maintenance overhaul at Palmdale and the ejection seats (along with the explosive hatches) had been fully removed. Ejection seats were not further developed for the shuttle for several reasons:

Very difficult to eject seven crew members when three or four were on the middeck (roughly the center of the forward fuselage), surrounded by substantial vehicle structure.

Limited ejection envelope. Ejection seats only work up to about 3,400 miles per hour (3,000 kn; 5,500 km/h) and 130,000 feet (40,000 m). That constituted a very limited portion of the shuttle's operating envelope, about the first 100 seconds of the 510 seconds powered ascent.

No help during a Columbia-type reentry accident. Ejecting during an atmospheric reentry accident would have been fatal because of the high temperatures and wind blast at high Mach speeds.

Astronauts were skeptical of the ejection seats' usefulness. STS-1 pilot Robert Crippen stated: 'in truth, if you had to use them while the solids were there, I don’t believe you would [survive]—if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids, that you would have ever survived, or if you did, you wouldn't have a parachute, because it would have been burned up in the process. But by the time the solids had burned out, you were up to too high an altitude to use it. ... So I personally didn't feel that the ejection seats were really going to help us out if we really ran into a contingency.'"

-Information from Wikipedia: link

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L39 Ejection Seat

Photo by Axel Ruhomaully