Dan Snow's History Hit - The Ejector Seat

Episode Date: June 4, 2023

An ejector seat propels a human at speeds reaching 200 miles in less than a second. It can save a life... or snap a neck. John Nichol remembers pulling the ejector handle in his Tornado aircraft flying at over 500mph above the Iraqi desert, launching him back down to earth. It saved his life, but he wasn't able to recover in a hospital because he was captured and taken straight to an Iraqi prison. This makes him the most appropriate guest to take Dan through the history of the invention of the ejector seat, how it works and what it was like to eject. He delves into the incredible history of the Martin Baker ejector seat, still being made in London today and astonishing stories of the first ejection in combat, of American soldiers ejecting out of burning aircraft over Vietnam in the 80s and how they were all given a second chance at life by ejecting.This episode was produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.His new book is called 'Eject! Eject!'Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I got married on a Saturday and I went to work on a Monday. We had a kind of low-key affair and we didn't go on honeymoon for a few months. In fact, we just co-opted a holiday, a vacation we'd already planned, and we went as our honeymoon to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields. It was super romantic. Anyway, I digress. So I went to work on the Monday after my wedding and told the team I'd got married the weekend. They all patted me on the back and then we went to make a short film for a BBC TV show. That film was at a remarkable factory in London of all places. Yes, they still make stuff in London, inside the M25. It was the Martin Baker factory. They invented and they still produce the world's best ejector seats. So the first thing I did after getting married was go and film in an ejector seat factory.

You don't have to work at the joke too hard there, but I'm pleased to say it is now 13 years later and my wife has never pulled that ejector seat handle. Thank goodness. Today, I'm talking all about ejector seats because I've got John Nicol back on the podcast, and you've heard him on the pod before. He is truly a national treasure. He was an RAF officer. He was a navigator in 15 Squadron, and he was shot down during a low-level sortie attacking

Iraqi positions during the Iraq War, the War of Kuwaiti Liberation in 1991. He was then captured by Iraqi forces. He was taken to Abu Ghraib prison. He was tortured, beaten, before being released, and has written a series of best-selling books, both about his own career and about history. He's been on the podcast before, talking about Spitfire, the Lancaster, and other aircraft.

He is one of the most optimistic, the most Spitfire, the Lancaster and other aircraft. He is one of the most optimistic, the most brilliant human beings I know. And I'm thrilled that he's written a new book all about the history of the ejector seat, the experience of being ejected, not just him, but by many of the people he's interviewed for the book. And as ever, he gives me an absolute masterclass in history communication. You're going to love this, folks. This is the very brilliant John Nicol. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. John, it's great having you back on the podcast, buddy.

Thank you so much, Dan. Your listeners will be getting bored with me appearing on your program all the time. I bet no one's getting bored with you, you bestseller after bestseller from the stable of John Nicol. Remind me, John, your forebears, your forebears in the RAF, in Air Force all over the world, in the Second World War, if their engine caught on fire or they lost control, they ran out of fuel, how did they get out of their aircraft? Let's start with a fighter, a single-seater fighter.

What would they do? Well, something like a Spitfire or a Huracan if it was disabled, the process was that you jettisoned your canopy, so there's a lever, you got rid of the Perspex canopy above your head. And you either try to unstrap and climb over the side and jump, or you turn the aircraft upside down, unstrapped and fell out. Now, clearly that was not the most efficient way of doing it. And you've been in the Lancaster as well, Dan, haven't you? So you imagine seven people in a Lancaster, which is on fire and it's spinning and it's falling. So you're under maybe six, seven, eight G, so three or four times a waltzer. And you're trying to clamber down to get through

the escape hatch, which is just a little bit smaller than you and your parachute are, which is why so many people were killed and why a better system was needed for getting aircrew out of doomed aircraft. So where does the idea come of pinging them out on a massive- On a bomb. Blasting them out of the air on a bomb? The Germans were doing it in the early 1940s. And so there's a very brief account of a chap called Helmut Schenk, who uses what is basically a compressed air gas machine to blast his seat upwards and catapult him out of the aircraft. But Sir James Martin, or James Martin as he was then, who founded the Martin Baker Aircraft Company, he started to

design ejection systems in the 1940s after his best mate, Valentin Baker, which is where the Martin Baker come from, his best mate died in an aircraft crash in front of James Martin's eyes, His best mate died in an aircraft crash in front of James Martin's eyes, burnt to death in a crashing aircraft because he couldn't get out of it. And James Martin then decided that he was going to devote his life, his skills as an inventor, which were incredible, to producing aircraft escape systems, which is what he did in the 40s until he came up with this escape system, which was basically, the first one was a bomb under a seat. And he needed a volunteer. And he said to his workmen, anybody want to volunteer to test

this? And Benny Lynch stepped forward and he was the first man to try it out. And how did Benny Lynch fare? The first pictures of Benny, he's a fitter in the factory. He's in his Sunday best as you would do back in the day for that kind of thing. He's got his suit on. He's got polished boots on. He's got his waxed moustache. He's perfectly coiffured. He is testing the seat on the ground on a ground ejection rig. So you know those fairground things where you hit a peg with a hammer and a bell rises up and rings a bell at the top of a rail? That's what the first ejection rig looked like. Benny strapped into what was basically a chair with a bomb under it on a rail, and James Martin exploded him up and down this thing a few times. He got on all right. The third person to try it

was a reporter. A reporter said, I'd like to try the ejection system on the ground. He did it and broke his back. So James Martin was adjusting the explosives that were going into this seat and eventually came up with one. And he said, right, I need somebody now to test this thing airborne. And he said, Benny, me old chum. And he sent Benny for parachute training. Benny is a fitter in a factory. Benny is sent off to the parachute regiment for parachute training.

He comes back. James Martin sends him airborne, blasts him out on the first ejection seat, which was totally manual back then. When was this? 1946, 1947. So Benny tests it. It goes on through a number of tests until they come up with a viable system. And it starts to go into aircraft that RAF aircrew are testing now. to aircraft that RAF aircrew are testing now. And Joe Lancaster, Joe had been a World War II bomber pilot, won the Distinguished Flying Cross. He is the first man to use an ejection seat in anger. And I interviewed Joe, lovely old fellow, sadly died now. And he said, he looked at this thing and they didn't know anything about it. They said they regarded it with real suspicion. He called it a curious contraption and damned dangerous. And Joe was the first man to use it in anger. And why is it so important? Tell me, apart from just humane grounds, why is it so

important to try and keep your air crew alive? Because we all think aircraft are so expensive. Surely those are the things that really matter. But is it just because we don't want to lose people and we want to give them every chance of hitting the ground safely? Or is there a military utility to making sure that aircrew can exit a plane and be fit again enough to fight another day? Well, there's a really, really good question. So today, a modern aircraft's worth probably 50, 60, 70 million quid. An aircrew, you can probably train for three or four million quid. If you go back to the First World War, they wouldn't give pilots parachutes because they didn't want them to leave the aircraft because they wanted them to stay in the aircraft and

fight their hardest to get them back down. That's the difference now. But now, of course, saving a human life is the most important aspect. An ejection seat is now the last chance to save your life in a catastrophic situation. And the stories in the book are those people who've been on the journey of ejection. So not just the saving of the life in an instant, but what happened afterwards. And for some of them, their stories are astonishing. Tell me about those first few people. Was it the Korean War that they were used for the first time in anger?

Well, first time in anger in combat, the Korean War, Dan. First time in anger was Joe Lancaster, 1949. He gets into the AW-52, the Armstrong Whitworth 52, an experimental aircraft that looks now like a stealth bomber. Amazing to see this in the 1940s. He gets into this thing to go off as a test pilot. He was then to test it. No manuals, no instructions, no computers. You tested an aircraft then by getting in and flying them. And so he goes off testing the thing. It goes out of control. It goes out of control at about four and a half thousand feet. And Joe is plummeting earthwards thinking, oh my giddy aunt, I've got to get out this thing. So Joe's process for ejecting, he had to first pull the lever to get rid of the canopy, the canopy blasted off.

Then he pulls his red handle, which pulls a face blind over his face to protect his face. And the bomb in the seat goes off. Bang. It is nothing more than a seat with a bomb in it. As he is blasted clear of the aircraft, a little parachute comes out the back, which helps to stabilize the seat. But now Joe, 1949, is tumbling like a sycamore leaf in this seat. So the earth is flashing in front of me. You can see the green fields, then the blue skies, then a river, then the earth. And he's tumbling. Joe now has to reach down to find his seat harness buckle, making sure he doesn't mix it up with his parachute harness buckle. He has to twist his seat harness, unclip the harness, unstrap himself

from the seat, push the seat away. He's still tumbling at 3,000 feet. He then goes into free fall. The seat falls away. He has to then reach back again and find the parachute release D-ring, and he pulls that and he floats down. Just over 30 seconds it took him. When I ejected, it was fully automatic and two and a half seconds. It's even better now, Dan. It's amazing the way that they developed from those early ejections. So now, do you have to even be conscious? Do you have to still eject yourself or can the plane decide it's time for you to go? Well, on the most modern aircraft or the most modern seat, the seat is now computer linked to the aircraft. And if the seat thinks that the pilot faces mortal danger in certain circumstances,

it will eject them without further reference to anybody. The first a pilot might know is that he or she is floating down in a parachute. And now the process has gone from 30 seconds for Joe Lancaster, two and a half seconds for me. It's now a second and a quarter, fully automatic. That is development. So John, I don't want to get into the weeds here, but does that not mean that if the plane decides that an incoming missile is unavoidable, can it eject you before any damage has even been done to the aircraft? No, it's not quite like that. With something like the F-35, which is the new aircraft that can hover, and the way that it hovers,

it uses different systems. And if one of those systems fails, because of the way that the aircraft will drop so suddenly, the pilot cannot react quickly enough, so the ejection seat will take over. But it won't come that far until you have an ejection seat that says, right, missile inbound, you're not going to survive this. I know what the missile is. I know that what's going to happen. I'm going to eject you. It can't be that far away, can it? It's the computer's world, John. We're just living in it. Yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness, that's crazy. In writing this book about ejecting, is there anything that you've

discovered that you'll have in common? Apart from a bad back, you're going to tell me, what does the experience do to someone? I think that everybody who's ejected, and I spoke to a lot for the book, talks about a second chance at life. And for some people, they then went on to eject again, a third chance at life. Some people, again, a fourth chance at life. One person ejected five times. And it is the notion of a second chance at life. And all of them, I interviewed their kids and many of those kids would not have been alive. And so there are now ejectees and families and sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters that could fill a stadium if it wasn't for the ejection seat.

And for me, that's what came through. The journey, the journey of ejection, a second chance at life for some people, a second chance at life that meant that they went back into combat and ejected again. And I'll tell you that story if you've got a couple of minutes at some point. Well, tell me that right now. So one of the guys I interviewed was called Guy Gruters. Guy was a super saver pilot in Vietnam. Guy was shot down by a Vietnamese AAA gunner. Him and his post, a two seat aircraft.

Him and his mate were flying a blazing aircraft for four or five minutes while they got out over the sea, where they ejected. And then a full combat rescue mission went in. And do you know the scenes from Vietnam with helicopters going in, machine guns firing, Vietnamese were coming across the waves in boats, F-4 Phantoms were coming down, bombing to try to protect them. They were eventually rescued. Guy went back to America, said to his wife, right, I've got four weeks of my tour left to do in Vietnam. I've been there for 11 months. I've got another month to do. He goes back to Vietnam. Two days later, he's shot down again. He does not see his wife and children for five and a half years, Dan. Five and a half years. I mean, the brutality in Vietnam. He watched his

best friend being beaten to death in front of him. His story is astonishing. His wife's story is astonishing. His two daughters' story is astonishing. They didn't see their dad. They didn't know their father for five and a half years. And suddenly he comes back into their lives. And it's that journey, that arc of a story, which is just amazing. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about ejector seats. More coming up. Join me, Dallas Campbell, on Patented, a podcast by History Hit, where we bring you the fascinating histories of the world's most impactful inventions. We uncover the exceptional

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Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And the Martin Baker factory still produces a huge chunk of the world's ejector seats. It's a huge British success story. And you've been there and there's a digital board on the factory. I was

there last year as a board. So Joe Lancaster, who I talked about was ejecting number one. I was ejecting number 6,089. I look today, Dan, and the board says 7,631. That's how many lives have been saved. All of the kids that were subsequently along, all the grandkids. And it's not just Martin Baker, because there's American seats and Soviet seats and Chinese seats, and we don't have those figures. But it is clearly tens and tens of thousands of people who've had that second chance at life. When I've flown in as a passenger in fast jets, they've always commented that my legs are so long, the jet seat probably break my legs, or I'd leave my kneecaps behind as I'm chucked out the top. How brutal was then, is the physical experience of being ejected?

It can be. The first ones were a bomb. The modern seats are a rocket. And so when I ejected, so first thing that happens is your arms are held in on restraining straps. Your legs come into the back of the seat on restraining straps straps, your four-point shoulder harness rams you into the back of the seat on a power extraction system. The Perspex cockpit above your head is blown away on a rocket pack. The seat ignites, the bang ignites, moves you up the seat. And as you move up the seat, it withdraws a rocket motor. The rocket motors fire and you accelerate from zero to around 200 miles an hour upwards under 18 times the force of gravity in about three quarters of a second. So it can be quite violent. So if you're flying at 600 miles an hour, it's like being hit by 600

mile an hour wind. And that can really damage you as well. One of the stories of the book is a friend who snapped his neck in half because the forces were so great. I can't remember what jet you flew in, Dan. Was it a typhoon or a tornado? Lucky enough to have been in both, yeah. So the typhoon has got one of the most modern seats. The tornado is the seat that I flew in. And we've got six foot three, six foot four pilots. And so the chances of you losing your kneecaps in a modern seat are slim, but accidents have happened. And certainly a mate who ejected in a tornado, there's a picture in the book, snapped both of his legs in half, his legs literally at 90 degrees to his body. They repaired them with Meccano. It's just an amazing story. And so you can be injured,

but not as injured as you would be if you hit the ground at 600 miles an hour in a tornado, which you'd be dead. And so it's your last ditch opportunity to live. And how about you? Have you got some spinal issues from it? So I injured my lower back, but now you'd be immediately taken to hospital and scanned and everything. Back in the 80s and even through the 90s, many people picked their parachute up and went off to the bar for a beer. Somebody literally picked up their parachute, lit a fag and went off to the bar for a beer. Now you'd be scammed. I clearly wasn't. I was captured and then held as a prisoner of war.

So instead of lying in a hospital bed for seven weeks, I laid on a concrete floor in an Iraqi torture chamber for seven weeks, which was pretty unpleasant, but I came out of it. My journey finished and I'm alive. I had a subsequent helicopter accident, which damaged another set of discs. And as you can see, Dan, I fell down the stairs three weeks ago and managed to crush all those discs again, smashing my head on a brick wall. So I'm a bit knackered at the moment again, to be perfectly honest. But hey, I'm still alive, my friend. I'm still alive. Well, and you seem to be in very good spirits and there's done no damage to your memory recall, that's for sure. You're still an encyclopedia on these things. And it's worth saying that the

genius of ejection, as you discovered, is you can do it from being on the ground, from low level. That's the remarkable thing about it. Absolutely. So the system went from the bang seat, which was a bang, just an explosive bomb, then graduated explosions that went off over kind of a third of a second so that you didn't have as much pressure on your spine to rocket seats. And I used a rocket seat and you would have been sitting on a rocket seat. And I don't know if you've got the book there that I sent, but the picture on the back is of a Harrier pilot ejecting on the ground stationary. That's Martin Purty, went on to be the leader of the Red Arrows. So Purty crashed his Harrier, fully armed Harrier, on the runway in Afghanistan.

And there's a video online of this. It's astonishing. And he comes to a stop and the whole of the aircraft is engulfed in flames. And Purty pulls the ejection. So he is stationary on the ground at zero feet, pulls the ejection handle. The rockets lift him about 180 feet. And then his parachute opens. And he's actually uninjured. He is one of the ones who stands up and walks away and celebrates to fight another day. And you were flying super low, weren't you?

Yeah. So myself and John Peters were flying. We were the first daylight low-level attack of Operation Desert Storm 1991 to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. And we were flying at about 30 feet, 20 to 30 feet, and maybe 550, 600 miles an hour when we were hit by a surface-to-air, heat-seeking surface-to-air missile. So we were hit by a surface to air, heat seeking surface to air missile. So we were really lucky to survive that because the jet nearly hit the ground, but JP managed to fantastically get hold of the jet. But the jet was on fire and we were trying to limp towards the border, but the jet was burning behind us. You couldn't see the jet because it

was burning in flames, but we were trying to get away from where we'd been shot down. But it wasn't to be. JP managed to pull up to about, I think, if I remember, maybe 180 feet. So I ejected and I was in the parachute for perhaps two or three seconds before hitting the ground like a sack of spuds, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I've never ejected before. Our parachute training involved, you know, when you're at school and you had those wooden benches, the gym benches, about 10 inches high. Well, that was our parachute training, jumping off a 10-inch wooden bench and practicing a parachute roll onto a rubber mat. And so all I remember is the ground coming up towards me. And I kind of forgot all this training. And I tried to climb up the parachute harness, tried to lift my legs and I just hit the ground like a sack of spuds, which didn't do me any good either, actually, to be perfectly honest. So how many seconds from being in a serviceable

aircraft flying low and fast over the desert to crashing into that desert floor and like a sack of spuds? Well, so being hit, then we probably had a few seconds to try to solve the problem and put the fires up, but it wasn't happening. But pulling the Mark 10 ejection seat handle, so that's the tornado one. It was the yellow and black ejection handle, a D shape that you put your hand in, pull it as hard as you damn well can. And I pulled it in two and a half seconds. After I pulled the handle, the parachute opens, I was floating down. So maybe three and a half, four seconds, sack of spuds in the desert. And that was it for me. And apart from anything else, ejection, I mean, it's one of the most extreme experiences we can

have. So how long does it take for your brain to catch up with all that? And you look around, think, right, where am I? Interestingly, I remember, because we said, right, ready, eject, eject. And so I remember pulling the handle hard as I could, hard as I could. And I remember basically almost a flash of light as the rockets ignited as I was going up and then just noise, fizzing, fizzing, and nothing more than that. And then the next thing, another smash and the parachute opened and the silence. And that was it, silence. And I was floating down. So that's all I remember. A number of people I spoke to. So one guy remembers the canopy of the

aircraft coming off because that is ejected on a rocket pack. So that comes off. So you're clear to eject. And he said, I remember the flames coming down either side of my body and thinking, this is really going to burn my legs. But obviously, it's only about a tenth of a second before the seat fires. And then somebody else said, he said, I remember the seat firing and that the seat is moving. But because the G is so enormous, he was still stationary, still looking at his computer screens thinking it's not working, but that's just because his body was being compressed and he was still looking at the same place on his computer screens. And then suddenly he's out of the aircraft. And he said that was the last thing

he remembers. People have different experiences. Some people remember nothing at all. One of the guys I talk about who snapped his neck because the ejection was so violent, remembers nothing of the day from three o'clock in the morning when his son came into the bedroom to say, daddy, I don't feel very well. That's the last thing he remembers of that day. And he was so lucky to survive. It was a midair collision between two tornadoes. So he came out at something like 600 miles an hour under so much G, they lost a wing, the aircraft's rotating. And the subsequent modeling said he came out under something like 600 miles an hour under so much G. They lost a wing, the aircraft's rotating. And the subsequent modeling said he came out under something like 20 or 30 G with a seat rotating.

The seat was spinning three times a second. The forces ripped his helmet off, ripped his mask off, almost ripped his head off. It's a terrible story, but it snapped his neck cleanly. He was completely unconscious, remembers nothing of this. A farmer found him face down in a cowpat in Lincolnshire, which kind of sounds quite funny, but it's not. The farmer, Dan, the night before had been watching 999, what's your emergency? And he knew two things. Don't move somebody because their neck might be broken. But if you have to move them, make sure you move them carefully and put them in the recovery position. So he got Ian, moved him out of the cowpat so he could breathe, put him in the recovery position and saved his life. And Ian remembers none of any of that going on. If I'd been ejected,

I'd have been cautious about getting into an aircraft a second time round. I guess everyone responds differently to that. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's your life. And so for me, all I wanted to do was get flying again. And 90% of people said that. There's a story in there.

I don't know if you remember this. 1982, in the midst of the Falklands conflict, during an exercise in Germany, an RAF Phantom took off from a base and did a practice intercept on a Jaguar with Steve Griggs on board. This happened all the time. You're practicing your skills. The Phantom forgot because it was an exercise. He was armed with live missiles. And he went, yeah, practice intercept, practice intercept, Fox 2, Fox 2, pull the trigger, and a missile comes off his aircraft, a sidewinder, and it shoots Griggsie down. So Griggsie's flying along. He's just about to land at RF Bruggen. He didn't react because it's so close to the end of the sortie. The next thing he knows,

his mate who's flying alongside him, the missile explodes and Paddy Mullins sees Griggsie's cockpit falling away as it's cut away by the warhead of the missile, slashes his cockpit off. Griggs is saying, what the hell is going on? My aircraft's not working anymore. He's mixing his controls, but his controls aren't fastened to anything because the aircraft's not there anymore. Paddy Mullen says, Griggs, eject, eject. And Steve doesn't know what's happening, so he just ejects automatically. His life is saved by the ejection. See, he was so lucky to survive the missile impact, never mind anything else. He goes to the bar for a beer afterwards. The two people who shot him down come to the bar for a beer. This causes quite a few problems because there's a massive inquiry. And the station commander goes

harpic that these two people are in the bar and everybody's laughing about it and sharing a beer. Griggsie goes flying again two days later. A couple of months later, he's flying again. His Jaguar catches fire and he ejects again over Scotland. And there's people who eject three times. It's your job. It's what you want to do. But again, it's the stories that kind of the arc of the journey, which is the most important part of the story of the ejection seat. Well, I wonder the future of ejection seat is all about the future of manned aircraft itself, isn't it? So as long as there's a human in there, there'll be some kind of ejector seat, I guess. I would imagine. The Air Force is certainly looking at unmanned aircraft, and that will be the way ahead. You just look at what drones are

doing in Ukraine now. Unmanned aircraft are the future. But people said that in the 1980s. People said unmanned aircraft are the way ahead, and we're still designing manned combat aircraft. Well, John, thank you very much indeed. As ever, you're one of the most extraordinary guests on the podcast. Thank you. And thank you for doing it, even though you've had a little injury to the spine. It doesn't sound like anything new for you. What is the book called? The book is Eject, Eject. Leaving the aircraft is just the start of a journey. Thanks for coming on, John. Cheers, Dan. All the best. you