Title says it all really… I was watching the video of a last-minute ejection, and it got me to wondering… most pilots will never need to seriously consider bailing out of their aircraft, much less actually pulling the ejection handle.
Of the ones who do need to eject, how is it that they’re sufficiently prepared to successfully do something that they never expect to do in their career? Is this a routine part of training simulations?
I should add… my question is how frequently they train on ejection, not whether they’re trained at all. I assume they’re at least oriented to the device and have a chance to actuate it once or twice. I just wonder how often they do realistic training for an impending crash.
Youtube has videos of ejections seat training. Yes, you have to have training to do it safely. As a medical student with an Air Force Scholarship, I did most of the training (to understand what would/could happen to pilots and crew).
Ejection seat training (very fast ride!) with a pre-ejection checklist
Parachute landing fall training-jumping off of towers of various heights to learn how to hit the ground safely-included “swing landing fall”: in a parachute harness attached to a line, jumping off a tall tower and swinging back and forth (checking your equipment) as they lower you towards the ground, then they let you drop the last 6-8 feet to the ground. You had to land, roll properly and get out of the harness.
They also put you in the harness and made you lie down face down on the ground (regular, rough ground, not lawn) and they would pull you along the ground (to simulate wind keeping your parachute partially filled) You had to flip yourself over and unhook your harness before they would stop.
MAJOR body soreness and bruising after the above exercises.
Water evacuation training-jumping off of platforms and out of the side of an airplane into the pool (in BDU’s with boots on) getting out of harness, treading water, inflating life vest, swimming under a parachute , getting into the lifeboat.
A few volunteers got to ride in the human centrifuge (they crank up the g-forces until you pass out and release your grip on the stop switch, or do it voluntarily) , and also do the underwater escape training. You get in a mock up of a cockpit, strap in, and they lower the cockpit into the water and flip it upside down. Then you have to get out of the seat and the cockpit and swim to the surface. There were scuba divers in the pool to help if you had problems.
Pilots and crew are too valuable of an asset to not prepare them to survive in any eventuality. They get a lot of training in these areas.
We also spend 3 days of land survival training. (Cactus tastes like green beans, armadillo’s are very hard to catch but tasty, how to make a tent with part of a parachute, sanitation, using a compass, avoiding capture)
I don’t know how often the pilots and crew train this way. Often enough that the appropriate actions would be “automatic”.
As pudytat72 posted, training was a regular thing for Air Force aircrew. I don’t remember how often we did it…maybe quarterly? At least twice a year, we had to go over and have what was called “egress training” in every aircraft type we flew. The training included both emergency ground egress, and ejection training. I flew in four different fighter types plus a chopper, so it seemed like I was always getting trained in something.
Our water survival training was an annual thing. It included parasailing and also being dragged behind a boat similar to the land drag described above.
We did underwater egress as a once in a career thing…well…I was only in for four years, so I only did it once, anyway. Went to Pensacola N.A.S. for it, had to swim 75 yards in full flight gear, then go through the dunker. The dunker was a huge barrel simulating the cargo area of a chopper. We strapped in, then they dropped the barrel into a pool and flipped it over. We then had to unstrap and swim out. Did that twice, the last time blindfolded to simulate a night situation.
Even journalists who go for one guest ride in a jet have to train for ejection. Here’s video of James May preparing for a ride in a U2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHOX3deFhbw
And here’s his flight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6cZLfK4Zjk&feature=related
I used to do that.
In initial pilot training there was a bunch of academics and hands-on training related to ejection and parachuting.
We practiced the physical actions many, many, dozens of times over a few weeks to burn them into your head. A normal part of military flying is also memorized procedural steps for a few, say 5 to 10, very urgent emergencies. Each aircraft type has their own set of emergencies and aircraft-specific steps, but ejection is one of them on any aircraft so equipped. You’d have a written test daily on the entire set and a single word misspelled or hyphen out of place was a big deal. The minimum accepted standard was total perfection.
We fired ourselves out of a mockup cockpit on a simulated ejection seat that was a real seat but powered by compressed air like a catapult. It launched you and the seat some 20 feet up a rail & then the mechanism lowered you back down gently. Sorta like some extreme amusement park rides are now.
It was not as violent as the real thing, but it was a lot more violent than an amusement park ride.
We also did a sort of hybrid parasailing where we tow-launched behind a boat or a pickup truck using a real seat parachute & then disconnected when a couple hundred feet up and did the final descent & landing for real. Seat parachutes are not nearly as steerable or slow-descending as modern sport 'chutes even back in the 80s when I was doing all this. Landings where / are pretty harsh.
So that’s initial training. Whenever you’d change aircraft types you’d learn the new emergency steps and practice the motions in an inert high-fidelity mockup a couple dozen times over a couple weeks.
Once out in ordinary squadron service you’d get retrained / retested on all this every 6-9 months. Sit through a couple hours of refresher live lecture & video, on everything about using the seat and the parachuting & landing which (if you were lucky) followed. Then go through all the motions for ejecting, parachuting, and landing in various mockups. In trees. In water. In flat terrain. Against cliff faces. At night. And in combat versus in peacetime.
Also, the daily written emergency procedures test continues throughout your flying career, so the steps for engine fire, takeoff abort, and yes, ejection, are pretty well burned into your head. I flew 4 different types in my 8+ years. The last was 23 years ago. I bet could still get about 50% on all 4 tests, not having thought about any of it since then. Burned in. Burned in deep.
Finally, as a profesional whose life is on the line every time you hit the start switch, you rehearse these things. At sometime during the start, taxi, and wait for takeoff process, you go through a ritual of mentally repeating the verbal steps & miming the actions for takeoff abort and for ejection. Move the hands, touch the switches or controls, arrange the head & neck & feet. And do it all at real time speed. With that mental and physical preparation, it takes about a 2/10ths of a second to go from *decision made *to *seat actuated *and then (hopefully) all the magic is doing its work. If all goes well, about 1 second after that you’ll be a couple hundred feet away from the airplane under a rapidly opening parachute. If you were close to the ground, you’ll have a few seconds at most until landing/impact. Better be sharp.
As an aside, much of the airline biz approaches takeoff aborts in a similar fashion. Mentally & physically rehearse an abort before each takeoff, because this one just might be your (un)lucky one, and you’ll have almost no time to get it right, and a lot of ways to get it pretty spectacularly wrong. Film at 11.
Historically, most pilot losses in ejection seat aircraft come from either fundamentally unejectable situations, or the pilot delaying the decision to eject until a good opportunity degraded into no opportunity as the fire got worse or the altitude lower or the vector more inverted, or the gyrations more chaotic, or …
So a significant part of the training is about getting to the mindset that jumping out is a good end to a bad situation. If the situation is bad & about to get worse, bail. It’s not a personal failure or admission of cowardice or weakness. Yeah, we’d all like to bring the jet home every time. But if it’s bad & about to get worse, pull the handle & give the jet back to the taxpayers.
Note I said “bad & *about to get *worse”. Bad & actually *getting *worse is usually too late.
As I sit here today, I think that sums up a lot about flying, and fighter flying in particular.
Flying is all about accurately predicting what the situation will be in 5-60 seconds and doing *now *what will have been needed by then. The faster & more dynamic the environment, the harder it is to accurately see farther and farther into the future. But the more necessary it becomes. Folks crash or get shot down when they can’t accurately see well enough, far enough, into the future. And then that future arrives in the form of an explosion or terra firma. Which is why most pilots’ last words & thoughts are surprise, not resignation.
Delayed ETA - Must type faster or write shorter essays. None of the replies were there when I started …
Let me reframe my question a bit, I did not pose it very well.
Are ejection scenarios a regular part of flight simulation training? I’m most interested in how pilots develop the awareness of when is the right time to egress, not really interested in how they’re familiarized with the operation of the ejection mechanism.
For instance, I was reading about space shuttle astronaut training, and I was impressed at what a huge portion of simulation time is dedicated to non-mission-oriented outcomes… landing the orbiter in Canada after early liftoff, landing the orbiter in Ireland after late liftoff, putting it into the “wrong” orbit after major loss of thrust, etc. They train a huge amount of time on controlling the aircraft in catastrophic failure scenarios. I was wondering to what extent fighter pilots do the same.
This.
Keeping the aircraft in the air is not nearly as hard as getting it off the ground/deck and getting it back on the ground/deck. So, yeah, most of the training is dealing with “what if’s”. Normal operations you learn early in the game, and normal procedures need to be reviewed so that you don’t get sloppy, but so many things can go wrong at so many different times, that most of the training is problem solving.
Pilots practice “touch and go”'s all the time. The simulator is to practice correcting things that can kill you - you can’t learn how to avoid a mistake if it kills you the first time.
So you’re in the simulator, training for the umpteenth catastrophic failure. Do you ride that simulator to the ground, trying to recover the aircraft, or do you at some point push the eject button, even though you won’t die in the simulator?
Right, and is an instructor grading you on whether you unnecessarily destroyed a simulated $20,000,000 aircraft (or unnecessarily died, depending on the circumstance).
“the Devil is in the details”- it’s not just the end result.
-how quick did you recognize the problem (rapidly developing problems and slow,sneaky ones or both at the same time)
-why did you this and not that?
-what is the first, second, third thing
-what do you do when you “do the right thing” and it doesn’t work?
“With both engines out, a cool-headed pilot maneuvered his crowded jetliner over New York City and ditched it in the frigid Hudson River on Thursday, and all 155 on board were pulled to safety as the plane slowly sank.”
I thought it was very interesting that the jetliner pilot also had training as a glider pilot.
Aaah, different question.
In my era & aircraft, (F-16A in the 80s), simulators for frontline fighters were mostly for instrument flight training. And radar bombing training. The sim’s visual system was really weak. We did not yet have the full spectrum mission combat simulators. There were a few special purpose rigs like that, but they were few and far between, more for research than training.
So In most cases we couldn’t take a simulation scenario to an ejection. We couldn’t realisticaly simulate loss of control, nor engine out forced landings going badly, nor combat damage. So sorting out when to bail was in most cases much more a tabletop exercise.
But there was one *bail or not *scenario we did go through each time. That was low altitude engine failure. At that time the preferred attack mode was as low and fast as possible, so the possiblity of eating a bird or a bullet or having a mechanical failure in that flight regime was very possible. And with just one engine, having it quit was a big deal.
The approved response was to immediately jettison stores & start a zoom climb, followed by running through the alternate engine start procedure.
[The engine had a primary and a secondary ignition and fuel control (think equivalent to the computer / fuel injection system on a car). The primary was as modern as could be, while the secondary was a dirt-simple mechanical relic from the 1950s. While the primary was real reliable, there aren’t that many reasons for a jet engine to just quit other than a primary fuel control problem.]
Since you only had time for one restart attempt, the approved solution was to switch to secondary mode & try to restart the engine with that. Which restart was a very intense manual process of watching engine RPM & internal engine temperature and nuturing fuel into the engine at just the right rate so it lights off and then spins up without choking it with either too much or too little fuel. It was like walking a fairly narrow moving tightrope.
Meanwhile, you have to keep flying the airplane, your zoom is running low on speed so you have to manage the top of the parabola to keep airspeed about right for the engine lightoff. And watch altitude because once it starts going back down, you don’t have much time before it’s bailout time.
If you did everything right, the engine got to a stable idle & could be used (gingerly) about 10 seconds before you’d descended to bailout altitude. Any non-optimal performance on your flying, switchology, or throttle-jockying had the engine *aaalmost *started at the magic altitude. At which point the way to pass the test was to bail out.
Or if you really boofed something early on & the start was clearly a failure, the approved solution was to bail at the top of the arc. It was a foregone conclusion you couldn’t acheive a start after an early goof; it was simply physically impossible. And seeing clearly that particular 60 seconds into the future didn’t need a real good crystal ball. It did mean you had to not get fixated on the restart task though.
Not so much training in the sense that his employer provided it.
More in the sense that he, like a lot of airline pilots, likes flying & playing with airplanes and has tried a little of everything aviation has to offer. Probably 30% of airline pilots have flown gliders at least a bit. And maybe 10% have tried helicopters. well over half have flown light airplanes at some point, and many have also tried to moonlight (or prepare for layoff) by getting bizjet training.
Given the old days of relatively stable careers, good money, and some free time, indulging your extracurricular interests was far from rare.
People keep saying this, but when on landing approach, every pilot is essentially a glider pilot. Sullenberger’s success was the inevitable result of 40 years of experience with an extra emphasis on safety, combined with extremely favorable conditions, supported by a very capable aircraft.
Thanx LSLGuy. Those were incredible comments. Plus I like the word “boofed.”