![]() He was flying a He 280 which was being used to test new jets for the Fieseler Fi 103, so the original jets had been removed and his He 280 was towed aloft during a heavy snow storm. On 13 th January of that year a German test pilot, Helmut Schenk, found the controls of his plane had iced up and were inoperable. The first system was used in a prototype jet-engined fighter – the Heinkel He 280 – in 1940, but it was not actually used in action until 1942. Heinkel and SAAB both worked independently on the project, using compressed air to eject the seat and pilot. ![]() Clearly a better way of escape from an incapacitated aircraft was needed. Sometimes this was difficult because the pilot was injured, or the escape route wasn’t clear and with the advent of the jet engine the g-forces were too great for a bail out. ![]() It was first tested successfully at Paris-Orly airport on 25 th August 1929.īut none of these systems was in use by the military at the beginning of the Second World War, and the pilot’s only means of escape was to jump clear of a plane (bail out). The first design with a detachable seat was invented in the late 1920’s by Romanian Anastase Dragomir. The first attempt to create an ‘assisted escape’ for a pilot happened as early as 1910 when Everard Calthrop, who also invented an early version of the parachute, patented a bungee-assisted seat which used compressed air to eject the pilot, but not his seat. Everyone knows about ejector seats and how they work, but do you know how long they have been in use? The ejector seat is designed to enable a pilot or aircrew to exit a plane in an emergency – an explosive charge propels the seat out of the aircraft, and the pilot with it. ![]() An example of this occurred on 13 th January 1942. As well as being a time of terrible destruction, wars are also a time of rapid innovation. ![]()
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