[Bill McIntyre]

A couple of comments prompted by the last couple of posts.

If an airbag in the instrument panel malfunctioned during the catapult shot it would push the stick back in the pilot's lap and cause the aircraft to over rotate and stall. When I was in flight school, we were shown film of a cat shot of an F-4 in which the radar screen had not been bolted back in after maintenance. The aircraft went almost straight up and the pilot ejected in front of the ship.

On the subject of zero-zero seats, perhaps I should elaborate for those not in the know. It refers to an ejection seat that you can use successfully sitting dead still on the ground- zero altitude-zero airspeed- and still survive. For comparison, it might be useful to compare it to seats that came just before. Those could get you high enough to survive a zero altitude ejection as long as you had enough forward airspeed so that the chute deployed horizontally before you swung under it. But a zero-sero seat has to get you high enough so that you have room to fall vertically and let the chute deploy before you hit the ground. It does it this way.

When you pull the face curtain, an explosive charge starts the ejection seat up the rails. After it travels a few feet, a second charge is ignited to further accelerate you. There is a cable coiled under the seat, with one end bolted to the deck of the aircraft and the other end connected to the sear on a rocket motor. When the cable is extended fully, the rocket motor fires and continues to push the seat and occupant even higher in the air so that there is enough altitude for the chute to deploy. The simpler alternative would have been to have a bigger explosive charge, but that would have broken the pilots back and/or neck.

OK not that you are edikated, back to Jerry's problem. His aircraft had a zero-zero seat. But he also had a very sink rate before impact with the runway. If he had tried to eject, simple vector analysis says that he would have been pushed upward from platform that was falling away from the seat, so it might have canceled out all the upward thrust of the explosive charges. I doubt he would have separated from the seat before hitting the ground.


BTW, even the F-4s that I was flying before I retired in 1980 had zero-zero seats, but I'm happy to say that I never tried one out.