Man, 64, Accidentally Ejects Himself From Fighter Jet

[lakelandman]

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/fran ... index.html
A surprise company outing to an airbase caused a 64-year-old French man so much stress that he flung himself from a fighter jet in midair, grabbing the ejector button in a panic and tumbling through the skies above France before landing in a field.
The man had been surprised by employees at his firm, who had organized a joyride in a Dassault Rafale B jet for him as a treat.
But they apparently didn't know their colleague as well as they thought. Once the man arrived at the Saint-Dizier airbase in northeastern France in March 2019 and realized what his co-workers had arranged, he began to feel extremely stressed, according to a fairly remarkable aviation accident report by a French government agency.
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The unnamed man had never expressed any desire to fly in a fighter jet and had no previous military aviation experience, investigators discovered.
And thanks to a watch he was wearing which could measure his heart rate, investigators noticed that "his heart was in full tachycardia" before the flight, with a recorded heart rate ranging from 136 to 142 beats per minute.
But the man went through with the ride, joining a three-plane training exercise as a passenger. The Rafale B is used by the French air force and has a maximum speed of nearly 1,400 kilometers per hour (870 miles per hour).

Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety
When the jet was 2,500 feet above the ground and the pilot began to climb, the passenger panicked and reached for something to hold onto.
Unfortunately, that something was the ejector seat button -- and the 64-year-old flew from the fighter jet.
To make matters worse, he had not securely attached his helmet, which went flying in midair.
Fortunately, the man avoided serious injury after parachuting to earth in a field near the German border.
Investigators concluded that the error was caused by an involuntary reflex, prompted by stress and the jet's sudden movement.
The pilot was not ejected and managed to land the plane safely, despite suffering some minor facial injuries during the ordeal.
The passenger, meanwhile, was taken to a nearby hospital after the flight.

[Pissed Off Patriot]

i wonder how much that cost. It can't be cheap to set the ejector seat back in place.

[Tenzing_Norgay]

[flcracker]

i wonder how much that cost. It can't be cheap to set the ejector seat back in place.

€75,000,000 Euros, if it had worked properly.

https://taskandpurpose.com/military-tec ... nical-flaw

But of all the things that went wrong during this incident, one of them actually ended up saving the aircraft. According to Aerotime, the ejection handle should have ejected both the man and the pilot, but a technical flaw got in the way (emphasis ours):

The fighter jet was set up to, under normal conditions, eject both the pilot and his passenger when one of them pulls on the ejection handle. The BEA-E explains the procedure of a Rafale double ejection in four stages: first, the back canopy is shattered by a line of explosives embedded into the glass, before the passenger seat is ejected. Then, the front canopy is also destroyed, and the pilot seat is the last to leave the fighter jet.

But in this case, the last stage failed and, despite his canopy being ejected, the pilot remained in his seat. Local media reported at the time that the glass of the canopy had slightly injured his hands. Nonetheless, he remained master of his aircraft. “He then remained calm to pilot his plane despite the multitude of failure messages that the on-board computer displays and an unusual aircraft centering following the loss of the rear seat and the canopy,” says the investigation, which analyzed the radio recordings.

To be clear: while the civilian was flying through the air (he sustained minor injuries), the aircraft's pilot was able to safely land the jet at the airbase. For 24 hours after the flight, a "safety perimeter" was even established around the jet in case the ejection seat activated before it was safely defused. That's some damn good flying right there.

[Pissed Off Patriot]

i wonder how much that cost. It can't be cheap to set the ejector seat back in place.

€75,000,000 Euros, if it had worked properly.

Yeah, the whole damn plane, because it crashes.

I guess ya gotta look on the bright side. Better to find out now that it didn't work properly, because if they had needed it to work properly in the correct situation, it wouldn't have.

[Legio]

He just had to say that he didn't want to go and I would have taken his seat. If you boys want to buy me a trip in a Rafale, by all means, do it.

[osprey21]

I'll bet that was better than an old 'E' ticket ride at Disney.

[TonyR]

I'd be willing to bet he shit himself,literally,what with not expecting that to happen,LOL.

[Bmup]

On the bright side, he absolutely knows for certain that there's nothing wrong with his heart. Although he'll probably never see those shoes again.

[Outgunu]

1st off, anyone flying in a military jet should get ejection seat training prior to their ride to prevent what happened. 2nd, normally only the pilot command ejects causing both him and the back seat to eject, the back seat normally ejects alone if their ejection handle is pulled. Furthermore, det cord blows off the canopy, it doesn't just shatter it. This whole thing doesn't sound right.