As a young Air Force maintenance technician, Steve Blank got to learn a bit about ejection seats — maybe a bit too much:
The last thing you want is a seat going off by accident when some maintenance guy sticks his hands to rummage under the ejection seat when he dropped his screwdriver. (Something I did many times.)
When the airplane is parked the crew chief inserts safety pins to “safe” the seat. These pins stop the mechanical systems used to fire the seat. The pins had long red streamers attached to them that said “Remove before flight.”
Each time you got to an airbase you’d get briefed on aircraft safety on the “egress” systems. Someone in your shop would take you out to an aircraft and show you where each of the pins were supposed to go and make sure you knew what not to touch, kick or remove.
The accidents that happened when something did go wrong were gruesome. When I got to my first airbase in Florida they first thing they told me was, “You might want to pay attention, we scraped some airman off the hanger ceiling three months ago.” And a few months later at my base in Thailand the same thing happened again.When I came home from Thailand I was stationed on a B-52 bomber base. These 8-engine bombers carried nuclear weapons and had a crew of six in a two-story cockpit. On the upper deck the pilot and co-pilot faced forward, and right behind them sat the Electronic Warfare Officer and the Tail Gunner facing backwards. All four crewmembers had upward firing ejection seats just like the fighter planes I had worked on.
But on the bottom deck sat the Navigator and the Radar Navigator (the bombardier) and their seats ejected downwards.
Two of my new shop mates took me out to my first B-52 to get me “checked out.” You entered the plane from a hatch in the bottom deck and climbed a ladder to the top deck. We started on each of the four seats on top as they taught me where all the safety pins went.
As they showed me around the cockpit they kept emphasizing how much more dangerous the B-52 ejection systems were than those I was used to on fighters. “These are really old planes and these ejection systems are really, really touchy.” By the time we got to the bottom deck, I was gaining a real respect for these seats. “Oh, these seats down here? If they ever went off you’d be fired right into the ground and then burned to death by the rocket.”They sat me in the Navigators seat as they kept telling me more and more horrific B-52 ejection seat stories. “Yeah on these seats the ejection sequence automatically starts when it grabs your legs. The rocket fires in 10 seconds.” Sitting in the navigators seat, I was processing that when they said, “Move your legs back to get some more room.” I kicked my legs back and then heard a loud metallic noise.
All of a sudden my legs couldn’t move. Something had grabbed my ankles.
My shop mates looked at me and yelled, “Holly sxxt! He’s initiated the ejection system! The rocket is going to fire!! Lets get out of here!”
I looked in horror as they jumped out of the hatch and left me alone to die. I struggled to find a way to get out of the seat. Through the open hatch I could hear my shop mates counting down waiting for the seat to fire.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
I closed my eyes and prepared to die.
Time passed. I was still alive. I could hear laughter coming from the hatch as my shop mates came back up and unlocked the leg restraints. (They were just mechanical devices that didn’t arm the ejection system.)
As they helped me down out of the hatch there must have been 10 more of my shop mates gathered on the tarmac.
“Hey, he didn’t even wet his pants.”
I had just been initiated as a maintenance technician on the B-52.