"The following engineering documentary film covers tests of the B-52 upward ejection seat. These tests were conducted at Project Smart, Hurricane Mesa, Utah, by Coleman Engineering Company, Los Angeles, California, under contract to the Aircraft Laboratory of Wright Air Development Center." US Air Force film Originally a public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejection... Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... In aircraft, an ejection seat is a system designed to rescue the pilot or other crew of an aircraft (usually military) in an emergency. In most designs, the seat is propelled out of the aircraft by an explosive charge or rocket motor, carrying the pilot with it. The concept of an eject-able escape capsule has also been tried. Once clear of the aircraft, the ejection seat deploys a parachute. Ejection seats are common on certain types of military aircraft... A bungee-assisted escape from an aircraft took place in 1910. In 1916 Everard Calthrop, an early inventor of parachutes, patented an ejector seat using compressed air. The modern layout for an ejection seat was first proposed by Romanian inventor Anastase Dragomir in the late 1920s. The design, featuring a parachuted cell (a dischargeable chair from an aircraft or other vehicle), was successfully tested on August 25, 1929 at the Paris-Orly Airport near Paris and in October 1929 at Băneasa, near Bucharest. Dragomir patented his "catapult-able cockpit" at the French Patent Office. The design was perfected during World War II. Prior to this, the only means of escape from an incapacitated aircraft was to jump clear ("bail-out"), and in many cases this was difficult due to injury, the difficulty of egress from a confined space, g forces, the airflow past the aircraft, and other factors. The first ejection seats were developed independently during World War II by Heinkel and SAAB. Early models were powered by compressed air and the first aircraft to be fitted with such a system was the Heinkel He 280 prototype jet-engined fighter in 1940. One of the He 280 test pilots, Helmut Schenk, became the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft with an ejection seat on 13 January 1942 after his control surfaces iced up and became inoperable... the first operational type to provide ejection seats for the crew was the Heinkel He 219 Uhu night fighter in 1942. In Sweden a version using compressed air was tested in 1941. A gunpowder ejection seat was developed by Bofors and tested in 1943 for the Saab 21... In late 1944, the Heinkel He 162 featured a new type of ejection seat, this time fired by an explosive cartridge.... By the end of the war, the Do-335 Pfeil and a few prototype aircraft were also fitted with ejection seats. After World War II, the need for such systems became pressing, as aircraft speeds were getting ever higher, and it was not long before the sound barrier was broken. Manual escape at such speeds would be impossible. The United States Army Air Forces experimented with downward-ejecting systems operated by a spring, but it was the work of Sir James Martin and his company Martin-Baker that was to prove crucial. The first live flight test of the Martin-Baker system took place on 24 July 1946, when fitter Bernard Lynch ejected from a Gloster Meteor Mk III jet. Shortly afterward, on 17 August 1946, 1st Sgt. Larry Lambert was the first live U.S. ejectee. Lynch demonstrated the ejection seat at the Daily Express Air Pageant in 1948; ejecting from a Meteor. Martin-Baker ejector seats were fitted to prototype and production aircraft from the late 1940s, and the first emergency use of such a seat occurred in 1949 during testing of the jet-powered Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 experimental flying wing...
