August 20, 2013 • 37 mins
When the Jet Age came about, pilots found they had a brand new problem with their brand new planes: how to bail out when they found themselves in a pinch at 700 mph. In the mid-1940s, aerospace engineers got to work coming up with a fascinating and complex lifesaving device, the ejection seat.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the all New Toyota Corolla. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff, Work Stops
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
That's Charles W. Chuck. Chucker's Bryant. This is stuff you
(00:22):
should know. You can just call us MAV and Goose
for this one. No you can't. Okay, okay, it depends
who's MAV and who's Goose. Well, the the re email,
I said that it's very appropriate for the show. Why
because Goose died because his ejection seed malfunction. I know
(00:42):
he hit his head on the canopy. I know I
broke his neck. Is because he'd angered God earlier that day,
I guess so, so I'll be Goose. Are you planning
on dying? I'm just planning on you feeling guilt for
the rest of your life. You caused the spin by
being a guns blazing maverick. That is true, but I
(01:03):
would be like, I didn't design the injection seat. That's
the guy who should feel guilty for the rest of
his life. I'm gonna go get a taco. Um. Yeah,
I'm gonna go ride my motorcycle around Miramar. It's funny.
When I saw top Gun, and I may have talked
about this before, I remember thinking at the time, like, people,
you don't die in training exercises like that, that's so hollywood.
It up as a matter of fact, that happened very
(01:25):
well two years ago. It happens all the time. You
never hear about it. Yeah, there's the guys that make
the papers, my paper. It doesn't. It's sad that it doesn't,
but uh, yeah, like it. It happens. Our military died
during training and it's it's awful. My brother in law
is a helicopter pilos, you know, and he's lost several
(01:47):
friends through the years in training. Yeah. Is it in
crashes or from ejection seats crashes? Yeah? Um, there was
a guy in two thousand and eleven. You know the
Blue Angels, the what there's also the Red Arrows. Yeah,
I know the Blue Angels. Okay, Well the Red Arrows
um are another formation flying team, like just basically some
(02:09):
really great pilots, and one of them was killed when
his ejection seat went off while his plane was motionless.
The ejection seat just accidentally went off. That's a zero
zero ejection and that what that's called. Yes, but that
means you're on the ground and you're not flying at all. Right, Um,
but I think the problem is the plane didn't realize
where the ejection. Um, the sequencer didn't realize that it
(02:33):
was a zero zero ejection because the paras you never deployed.
So he died when he fell back down to earth
from a couple hundred feet out. I guess, yeah, well,
well this all makes sense in a second. Um. You
know what I think as a primer before, if you're
at home listening, you can go to the YouTube site
and look up, look up like ejection seat and there's
(02:57):
one like slow motion on the ground zero zero ejection
from film from different angles that really shows how it
all works. It's pretty cool and um, you really get
a sense of like what they do, go up a
couple hundred feet Yeah, and quick too, very quick. Um.
This so this is this is not even my intro.
I've got an intro, Chuck. There's a guy in World
(03:22):
War Two who is a tail gunner on a B
seventeen flying Fortress. And this man's name was Alan McGhee,
who's staff sergeant. And if you were a tail gunner
on the B seventeen, you were basically cramped into this
little gun turret with your knees up to your chest,
your heads poking out in a little clear canopy shell. Yes,
(03:44):
and you had no room whatsoever to wear a parachute.
You had to keep it in the cockpit with everybody else. Well.
Alan McGee is on this B seventeen called the Snap
Crackle Pop, and they're flying on a mission over France.
Satan is there, which was also known as Flack City
(04:04):
because of the anti aircraft guns down on the ground.
And sure enough, the Snap Crackle Pop took some flak lost.
A wing had a couple of holes in it, and
these holes in turn put holes into McGee's parachute. So
he needs to bail out. He finds a hole that's
(04:25):
been blown into the side of the the Snap Crackle
Pop and jumps out at twenty thousand feet with a
parachute with holes in it, with no parachute whatsoever, because
he was like why bother. He just knew he needed
to get out of the plane quick and he later
said that he thought he had a parachute. Yes, He
fall twenty two thousand feet more than four miles to
(04:50):
the ground, goes right through the skylight in the satan
Asaire Trades train station and Lands and Lives. He had
a um how does that happen? He had I'll tell
you a second. He had a broken right leg, broken
right ankle, nearly severed right arm, twenty eight shrapnel wounds
from the shards of glass because he fell right through
(05:12):
plate glass from again twenty two thousand ft four miles
above the ground, and he lived to tell about it.
A German doctor apparently took very good care of him,
and he later on said, you know, publicly thanked the guy,
even though he was a Nazi doctor, um for saving
his life. And so I'm reading about this and this
(05:33):
is just astounding. I'm looking into it more and more
and more, and there's no trick. It's just physics. Um.
This physicist Dr Seth Eisenberg, he's not a physicist, he's
a trauma specialist. He said on Popular Mechanics that there's
really no magic here. That he was going. McGee was
(05:53):
going as fast as he would have been had he
jumped off of something like a twelve story building. Once
you reach terminal velocity, it's all the same, whether it's
four miles or whether it's twenty feet. Um, it's still
pretty spectacular that he fell four miles through the roof
of a building and survived. The point of all this
(06:17):
is so the point was though, that he could have
fallen off a twelve story building through the plate glasses
and everyone had been like, Wow, that's pretty awesome, but
not miraculous. Yeah, compared to four miles it's not. Okay,
I got you. It's still be pretty miraculous that he survived.
Used to die, you know, twelve story building. He's pretty
banged up. Yeah, So the point is him just jumping
(06:37):
out of the the hole in the side of the
snap crackle pop was not that different from how you
would get out of a plane in World War Two.
You just kind of opened up the canopy and jumped
out and then you know, opened your parachute at the
appropriate height right or altitude. When that's fine with planes,
(06:58):
propeller planes, but once jets were introduced, you can't do
that because they're going so much faster than a propeller
plane does. You can't just jump out speed of sound, dude.
So around the time the jet age began, a company
named Martin Baxter, a British aviation company, started really looking
into the idea of the ejection seat, and we have
(07:21):
that today thanks in large part to them. Hats off, Yeah,
real men of genius. Uh So. An ejection seat, if
you don't know, just to put it very simply, is
a seat that is ejected from the aircraft ob jet,
can be a helicopter. Um. And it's a very much
(07:42):
a last second maybe not last second, but it's the
last ditch effort to save yourself when you know that
that aircraft is going down, right, Yeah, it's the that's
your last resort. You don't do that frivolously because number one,
airplanes are expense Yeah, they're also very dangerous when they
(08:02):
crash land. Yeah, and you really I think it's probably
bad form to scuttle your plane when you still have
control of it. Yeah, I think so. Like, hey, I
wonder what this thing does. Um. And the article points
out and it's once you really read this thing, it's
really true. It's one of the most complex parts of
an aircraft. Could be thousands of parts in some of these,
(08:24):
and the object is to get the pilot out and
then disattached from that seat without hitting any part of
the aircraft. So like up and out in a way
out of harm's way, at which point, um you become
a parachuter. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. You want to
get the pilot into the position to just parachute down
(08:44):
into the ground, and it all happens and under four seconds,
and about two to three of those seconds is the
actual parachute aspect, Like the ejection part is all in
about a second and a second and a half. It's
pretty pretty amazing, and we're gonna tell you how it works.
So the process of it is fairly simple. The procedure, right,
(09:06):
it's like, just get the pilot out of the plane
above it, out of the way of the plane crash, yeah,
and let the parachute happen to its thing. Right. But
when you look at the mechanisms involved in this, it's
extremely detailed, especially since when you had the first microprocessor
(09:26):
in charge of ejection seats. It's really neat. Yes, So
let's talk about ejection seats. Let's talk about the basics.
You've got. First of all, the seat, Yes, the seat
is connected. It's in the cockpit obviously, and it's attached
to rails um by by way of some rollers. So
you might think like the seats just like bolted to
the floor. It's not. It's on rollers on these rails
(09:48):
because those rails and rollers are going to do the
initial guidance of the chair at the proper angle out
of the aircraft. Right. You can't just go up, you
can't just go forward, you can't just go back right.
And when you go up those rails, you actually have
to go at a certain amount of speed, and that
(10:09):
speed has to be slightly more than the aircraft is
going or else you're not going to clear the cockpit. Yeah,
So to do that, you have what's called the catapult,
which is usually a charge. Yeah, that's what gets you
going up the rails and initially out. Um. Then there
will be a secondary rocket that that shoots you up
(10:30):
another couple of hundred feet and clear the tail of
the plane and everything. Um. And it does it quick too,
It does it really quick. And this is all This
whole system is called an A E S and Assisted
Egress system egress meaning exit or a way out. Um,
little on the nose, but I get it. Yeah, that's
the military. Um. And Uh, the canopy is you know,
(10:52):
if you've ever seen like a fighter jet, they've got
the clear clear canopy above them where they like wave
and like give the thumbs upside in the black Power
sign and all that stuff. Yeah, where they shoot a
bird at the Russian is in top Gun. Remember they
flew right on the upside down right above them. That
seemed almost incredible. It's very incredible. Yeah, and probably not real. Well,
(11:13):
that's what I mean, Tony Scott r I p um.
So you got the canopy, and the problem with the
canopy is it shouldn't be there when you're trying to eject.
It's right, So part of the assisted egre system is
the canopy actually uh blowing and getting the heck out
of the way. If you don't have a canopy, you
might have an escape hatch built into the roof. And um.
(11:38):
You do all this by pulling a lever either between
your legs or by your side or in the case
of Top Gun. I looked at the clip today. It's
too two loops behind their head that they pulled. Or
sometimes you might pull a face curtain down in front
of your face, which serves two purposes. It gets the
whole system moving and protects your face. And it's not
like a veil, no, it's like it's sturdy. Yeah. Well,
(12:03):
and I think of, like, you know what I think
of when I think of curtain and planes, I think
of like what they used to separate first class from
from coach. We don't want this to bereta. So here's
this black Lacey. He's like, I don't. I don't want
to see having to bail out. So those are some
of the ways. You know, there's all different kinds of systems,
but that's generally how it works. Okay, so we got
the general part before we go. Any let's do a
(12:25):
message break and let's do that. Yeah. They's about to
get really good though. Mm hm. Okay, So them's the basics.
We're talking about the basics. Yeah, let's get into the
nuts and bolts of this as it were. Yeah, and
(12:46):
bolts will come into play actually specifics. Um. So let's
talk about the seat. You've got your bucket, which is
where you sit. Um it. Also the seat comes with
survival equipment, which is kind of nice. Yeah, I licked
it up. Some survival packs have like oxygen, so if
you are bailing out and you're you're not attest to
oxygen at a high altitude, you're gonna need it. Um.
(13:08):
They have rifles in them. Which is just cool um blankets.
What I don't get is the seat ejects from the person.
So is the safety pack this stays attest Okay, so
you're still in a sitting position with this thing attached
to you or it's a test your back Okay, Yeah,
I was confused by that too. I'm glad you took
the time. Um, we cover the canopy. The catapult is
(13:31):
obviously what initiates it, and it's operated with, like you said,
ballistic cartridge. There's a lot of explosions going. You're riding
a bullet right then, yeah, pretty much, then you're going
to catapult the rails. You got your drug parachute, which
is a small parachute five two to five ft in
diameter that it initially pops out to uh, sort of
(13:52):
balance you and make sure you're not just flying all
over the place and slow you down a little bit,
right because I mean, if you're going in at even
a slight angle at the speed of sound, possibly, yes,
you need to slow down kind of quick. And the
drug parachute is just that little one like uh, then
the drags that's exactly what it is. And sometimes you
(14:13):
know how they'll have like a small one, and then
a big one. They have that too on injection seats
as well. And then the drug parachute also very commonly,
um will trip the larger parachute too after a certain
speed is reached. That's right. Um, what else, man, You've
got your environmental sensor, which will get into how all
this works. Um, But that is a device that tracks
(14:35):
airspeed and altitude. Um, it doesn't just shoot you up
and say I hope it's hope it's okay up there
right exactly? And then it also depending on the readings
it gets for your air speed and altitude, it'll it'll
trip like a certain type of sequence. So like if
you're at a very high altitude, there'll be a certain sequence.
If you're at a low altitude but going a very
(14:57):
fast speed, there will be a certain sequence, and so on.
And there's a car called modes of ejection. Well we
might as well go and cover that. It's Um, there's
something called and I had to look this up. It
was named for physicists Honree Peito, but um, everyone calls
them uh pedd or pidot tubes when it really should
(15:23):
be Peto tubes because he was French. But these are
when the when the sequence begin, it travels up the
rails and exposes these tubes and they measure air pressure
and the differences in pressure to determine like how fast
you're going and like which of these modes to enact
that we're talking about. So that that's the that's part
(15:44):
of the environmental center, and it sends that information of
the recovery sequencer, which is basically the chip that controls
the process. That's right. Um, So what are the three modes? Well,
there's low altitude low speed, which is less than two
fifty knots at less than fifteen thousand feet. No need
for a drug parachute. You barely even need an injection
seed at that point, you know. Um. There's mode too,
(16:07):
which is low altitude high speed for when you're like,
you know, Maverick or something like that, just going really
fast but low UM. And then there's high altitude any speed,
known as the scariest mode. Right. And so the modes
are all based on you'll notice two things altitude and
(16:29):
um speed velocity right. Um. And you put these things
together and you create a graph and inside the graph,
inside the the arc that's formed that's called the envelope,
and anything inside the envelope is um safety. Like it's
(16:52):
been proven, it's tested that if you follow this certain
sense of certain sequence of events for this mode, within
this altitude and this air speed, you're gonna most likely
be fine. That's right. If you go outside of that,
you are what's known as pushing the envelope. Is that
where that came from? That's awesome? It is. I thought
(17:14):
that was when you, like, we're super cool during negotiations
and you would just write down what you wanted and
push the envelope across the table. That's pushing your luck. Okay, wow,
I love that. You know me and word origins. Yeah,
I thought you'd like that when I saw it, and
I was like, Jack's gonna love it. So let's back
up a bit and uh start with with the bailout.
(17:36):
Your planes not doing well, you want to eject planes.
Not your plane is sick. You want to eject and
you pull the ejection handle. That sets off what we've
already talked about, that first explosion to catapult you up
the rails and into the air. And then there is
an under seat rocket motor that actually propels you even further.
(17:58):
And when you watch this thing in slow motion. It's
you know, serious rocket propelled action going on under your butt. Yeah,
and sometimes it's two stages, like the catapult and then
the rocket, but it's all in the same source. But yeah,
it's basically shot shooting you. So you go off on
a bullet and then a rocket. Yeah, that's what happens
(18:18):
when you're ejecting in like you said, within the first
half to one and a half seconds. Yeah, that's what
all this happens in the canopy obviously has been jettisoned
at this point, and that's a really cool thing to Like,
these things are have to functions canopy, so they're bolted
in there, and the way they're they're ejected as the
bolts are blown by little tiny explosive charges, right, that's
(18:40):
called lifting the canopy. Um, the bolts will blow and
the cannon people start to fly off, but then there's
another charge and another explosion towards the front that just
shoots it off in another direction away from you as
you're ejecting. All this is just so cool, man, how
fast it happens, how complicated it all is. Yeah, because
think about that, Like the computer sequencers still needs to
(19:02):
know what mode to follow, so like when that canopy
is starting to blow, it's taking the data readings and
deciding all this is going on in like a second,
a tenth of a seconded um. So lifting the canopy
is one way you can still become injured. You can
still run into the canopy, um I, just from blowing
the bolts. So there's another mode, um or another means
(19:24):
of getting rid of the canopy. And that's just shattering it. Yeah,
that's when it basically explodes. And uh, it's like you've
got chicken wire, but the chicken wire is explosive. Yeah,
just just evaporate. Yeah, well done, evaporate the slipstream. Just
makes it go by by really quickly. Um So for
all intents and purposes. Uh. And then we also mentioned
(19:47):
earlier if there is no canopy, there will be an
explosive hatch that basically that's the same thing that seems
the least safe to me, why because you can't see
through it. An explosive hatch makes me think of like
some really heavy thick steel that, yes, you can't see through,
and that is just really a hole in another bit
of heavy thick steel that you might bump into on
(20:09):
your way out, like like an escape hatch from a submarine.
That's what I think of when I think of a
hatch like that on a plane. You know, give me
a shattering canopy. You want it to dissolve above your head. Evaporate, evaporate. Alright,
So then once you're out from the rails, uh, that
(20:29):
secondary the rocket's gonna take you depends on your weight
A hundred to two hundred feet up to safe safely
clear you and um, I wish we had more recent
stats than this, but we have one from that said
that they had a success rate or I saw that
four d and sixty three injections. I saw that that's
a kind of standard for study from like I think
(20:51):
two thousand six or something like that, and they found
about eighty nine point four. And the bad news is
the other ten percent means you've probably died. Yeah, you know,
so it's either success or you die. Yes, I think
that's pretty much the I think saving your life through
the correct series is successful. Like if you're injured or whatever,
(21:13):
I think they still generally count that as success. Um.
So where are we man? So we're at the drug parachute.
The drug gun fires a metal slug and it pulls
out this little drug parachute. And then like we said,
then there's the secondary shoot that I think the drug
nnects that, right, yeah, the second they like the main shoot. UM,
(21:35):
so you get the main shoot out before this happens. Though.
Think about this when you are shot out on a
bullet and then on a rocket and you're going up
to I don't know, mark two, mark three, MAK one
is seven. UM. That's speed of sound like supersonic travel. Um.
(21:58):
And we have planes that can go a lot faster
than that. When you exit the plane like that, UM,
it's very easy for your seat to start to tumble
and move around and spin or your limbs. Let's say,
well we'll get to that. Just the seat itself. If
everything's going encoding, the plant plant can still tumble and
and this the wind resistance it meets can just push
(22:20):
it around in all sorts of weird angles. So there's
something called a Vernier rocket, right, and it's it is
a rocket that just kind of fires like um, remember
on Apollo thirteen when they were um like shooting off
the little booster rockets like need correct the yaw and
all that and pitch. That's what this rocket does. UM.
(22:44):
Or these rockets, I should say. It stabilizes the seat
and keeps it from spinning and tumbling and makes it
stay up and down exactly so it knows what it's doing,
just like your smartphone. Oh, yes, that what the compass
thing is. Yeah really well, I mean yeah, plus when
you tilted, it knows to go sideways. And yeah, I
(23:06):
mean I'm sure that or I hope the dejection seats
have a little more advanced systems. But yeah, gyroscope. Yeah, okay,
I never thought about that. Uh, maybe not a gyroscope,
but something that functions in that way. People are like,
that's not a gyroscope. We'll find out, Yeah, we sure,
well many times over. Okay, so Chuck, let's talk about
(23:26):
the physics of all this. Well, first we got to
cover the seat man separator motor. And that's actually once
you're in the air, you don't you're you don't want
you can't land in the seat. They wanted to get
you out of the seat, and that's accomplished by the
seat man motor separator. Yeah. This motor dease basically goes
we're and detaches the seat from you and you're you've
(23:49):
got your parachute one, You've got your survival pack still,
but the seat just kind of falls away to Earth
and you just um slowly parachute down and land and
if you're keptain scott O Grady, Yeah, then you spend
the next five days evading serbs. That's right, successfully successfully.
(24:13):
So physics my favorite topic. I know you love physics. Uh.
Newton's second law of emotion comes into play here obviously
because um force and acceleration of the crew member. Really,
you know, that's how you're gonna live or die. Yeah,
because when you exited plane, you get smacked by the wind,
that's right. I mean, you're going faster than the speed
(24:35):
of sound, and while you're normally operating the plane, the
plane's taking it on the chin for you. You're not
feeling this force of gravity nearly as much as you
are when you're no longer surrounded by the plane and
you're just exposed up there in the atmosphere. That's right.
So Newton's second law of emotion states the acceleration of
(24:56):
an object depends on the force acting upon it and
the mass of the object. Force equals mass times acceleration.
In this case, the mass is the mass of the
human pilot and the chair, right, and uh, the force Uh,
I don't know. Accelerations measured in gees right, So one
(25:16):
G equals the the amount of one the the amount
of the Earth's gravity right now, right. And so let's say, um,
let's say we're a hundred and eighty pound pilot at
sea level, we weigh a hundred and eighty pounds. That's
one g um when we're going t gs and so
(25:37):
on up to say twenty g s I believe, is
what the an ejection seat is like the best are
developed for At twenty g's hundred and eighty pounds, it
feels like thirty pounds. That's the force that you encounter
when you eject thirty pounds, All of a sudden of
(25:58):
force is being exerted on your body. Yeah, and keeping
in mind that one g of acceleration is equal to
thirty two per scond. Yes, And it all depends on
how much we weigh, like, that's how you figure out
the mass you in the chair. That's the big one. Also,
the the chair needs to know how fast to go
because it has to go slightly faster than the plane,
like I said, so it can clear it. That's amazing, Yeah,
(26:19):
it is. But when So when you reject and you
suddenly encounter twenty g s, which is the upper limits
of human Um, what's the word I'm looking for? Tolerance? Um,
A lot of really bad things can happen to you.
That's right, and we know this thanks for our buddy
(26:40):
Colonel step Yeah. Remember he used to have read outs
from the rocket sled and man he had some crazy
stuff happened to him. So what's the formula? UM speed
equals acceleration times time plus initial speed or v F
equals a T plus the I. Yes, So think about this. Okay,
(27:02):
what we just said is that, UM, we understand the force,
which is when you go up, you are suddenly exposed
to that lateral force, hit in the face with that
windy um, and you're also being pushed out and upward.
So I think you said that in some cases, within
(27:24):
the first second and a half you are up two feet,
So I think you said earlier something like you within
a second you are you go from sitting in the
plane to being up about two feet, So that means
you're traveling twot a second upward. So you're being pushed
(27:45):
up like that while you're being exposed to speeds of
upwards of seven twenty g's of force. UM. And all
of this is happening to your poor little body, so
a lot of really bad things can happen to it. Um,
first of all, First and foremost, I think the number
(28:06):
one injury from ejections is spine compression, oh man, Because
you're you're being pushed upward at a two ft a
second UM. That's a lot of force exerted on your
spinal column. So modern um ejection seats have things like
leg restraints, back restraints, restraints, and then that face curtain
(28:28):
restrain your head, and you were forced into a completely
up and down sitting position so that your vertebra are
stacked perfectly on top of one another, because any kind
of slip or any kind of angle leads to a
slip disc very easily. UM. And there's a long standing legend.
I couldn't verify that in the US Air Force, after
(28:51):
two or three ejections you're grounded for life because the
spinal compressions just basically used you up. I don't know,
I didn't see that it was true anywhere, but it's
an old legend. Well, at the very least, you're not
very good pilot, so they're like, yeah, maybe we should
around them. Or you're like three quarters your height that
you were when you enlisted because the final compressions, you know,
(29:13):
short now. So that's the number one I believe UM
injury that comes from ejection. There's also something with the
horrific name limb flail. So you're secured in your seat,
your arms, your legs, your head, you're supposed to be
totally immobile in that first couple of seconds, especially until
your parachute opens and you slow down and everything. If
(29:36):
your arm gets loose. Have you ever seen a dog
with its head sticking out of a car window on
a highway and it has real long, floppy ears, Yeah,
which is very dangerous. It's not something you should do
to your dog. It's bad for your dog. Developed cauliflowerer.
It's a bad thing to do. Get things in their eyes.
That's going like thirty to sixty miles an hour. We're
(29:58):
talking in arm a human r going more than seven
fifty miles. When it gets loose, what you have is
called limb flail, and what you have are completely shattered bones,
dislocated shoulders. Um, that's a bad jam. Or just imagine
going down the highway at like rolled on your window
(30:18):
and then quickly to stick your arms. Yes, yes, and
multiply that times you know whatever. Um, so that's another
type of injury limb flail. Um. There's wind blast, which
so they tested this on chimps of course, and um
it turns out that you can get third degree burns,
severe third degree burns just from the wind at um
(30:42):
mock one point seven. Being exposed to that peak one
point seven mack one point seven for one second can
give you severe third degree burns. Uh. And then there's tumbling,
which you might overlook, but think about this. Remember when
um know, the real math, No, the real life guys. No, uh,
(31:05):
the dude, oh man, No, the guy who jumped out
of the space capsule recently. You know the guy, yeah,
Felix bomb Gardener. Yeah, I can't believe I forgot that. Um.
The the when he jumped out, he started to tumble,
remember he started going in over end a first. No.
(31:27):
And the reason that that is really really bad is
because you can build up centrifugal force of your for
your blood and it pushes it outward to your extremities,
meaning your heart doesn't have any blood to pump any longer,
so you can die very quickly. I've seen between two
hundred and four hundred rotations per minute proves fatal to humans. Man,
(31:49):
how did that bomb grown? Your guy pull that off?
I don't know. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, and hey,
our own Discovery channel covered that live. Remember, Yeah, that
was huge. It was very cool. That first shot, Dude,
I like, I can't look at that when it just
falls out of it at his perspective shot when he
was just like all right, I'm jumping out of something
from space. Yeah, that was amazing. I remember, um, you,
(32:11):
me and I were coming back from some trip or
whatever and we just happened to be in the airport
when I remembered it was going on. I'm like, oh, yeah,
we should watch this, and ended up standing there watching
like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen
in my entire life. Yeah, I mean, that was just
an amazing thing to see. Yeah, and I bet you
he wants to top it. I'm sure he's like high
or still. Yeah. And do you remember the guy who
(32:32):
did that in like the like nineteen sixty or the
late fifties. Oh, he did it like in this exposed
weather balloon wearing like a high altitude a halo mask
and air supply and everything, and you've seen footage of it, yes,
but he ended up being like the whole program director
(32:52):
for Felix baum Gardner's jump, Like he tapped him because
he's the only other guy who's done anything like that,
and this guy did it in like the eight fifties,
I think, so he was literally the only person he
could say, what's it? Like? Manly? He said, it sucks
and it's awesome. Apparently he had like a hole in
his glove or something like that that they had he
told them back on the ground what was going on,
(33:13):
they would have called off the mission. And no, the
other guy and he just didn't tell him. So that's
how Felix bond Gardner works. Alright, Ejection Seats, you've got
anything else? I don't have anything else. Yeah, that one
was really cool. I thought, Yeah, very complex thing going
on very quickly, and watch that super slow mo and
(33:35):
then it shows it in regular time. It's pretty neat. Okay,
So since we don't have anything else, um, we would
advise you to go onto the how Stuff Works website
and check out ejection Seats. Type that into the search bar,
and since I said search bar, it is time for
listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this b FF. Hey, guys,
I've been listening for about six months and catching up
(33:58):
on most of your old shows. In that time. I
was introduced to your podcast by my best since sixth
grade friend, who was also a serious fan. I admit
that it took me a few episodes to warm to
your podcast, and now I feel a bit cheapish for
ever doubting my friends recommendation. Not only is she one
of the smartest people I've ever met, She's one of
my oldest friends. It knows me better than anyone. We
(34:20):
have a long history of directing each other to many
fabulous and geekye pursuits, but stuff you should know, maybe
the best of them all. And I have to say,
stiff competition. You're up against Tolkin, the X Files, Star Trek,
epic rat battles of History, Dune. She says, we talk
all of those. Wow, I mean I see the rat battles, sure,
(34:43):
Dune maybe, but tolkan X Files Star Trek. Although I
don't like Star Trek, you don't like Start check the movie,
the TV shows, none of it. People are gonna be shocked.
I've never seen a single Star Trek episode in my life.
I think I did when I was a kid. Now,
I'll bet I would like it as an adult now.
And I saw the Wrath of con Yeah, I saw
(35:04):
that finally. That was good. And then I saw the
the first of the new ones, but not the one
that just came out. I saw the one that just
came out. It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I'll get
into it. It's just not my universe. I'm Star Wars guy.
Not that you can't be, you know, get over this
this obstacle, this arbitrary and totally unnecessary wall between people
(35:26):
who like Star Trek and Star Wars. Uh. It's it's
not that I think there should be a wall. I
just never got into Star Trek as long as it's
you're not hating on Star trekah, No, of course, not
ak trick. All right, this has been like kind of
a geeky episode, have you noticed? Sure? Back to the
(35:51):
email from Catherine. A couple of months ago, my friend
came to visit for a weekend and we were discussing
the podcast. Both made similar comments about why enjoyed it
so much. I felt like we had two really great
and interesting friends with us whenever we wanted them or
needed them. We both worked long hours and jobs with
significant pressure, and sometimes time with great and interesting friends
(36:12):
it's hard to come by. Your podcast can be a
great band aid in maintaining sanity when face to face
interaction with real friends isn't possible. So thanks for being
such wonderful imaginary stand in slash other appropriate adjective friends,
and keep up a good work explaining like the universe
and everything. Best Catherine with the k R y N, Well,
(36:35):
thanks a lot. And she didn't say what her friend's
name was with I thought it was quite sounds like
a pretty bad friend, So Catherine's friend, hats off to
you as well. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thanks for
listening you guys. Um, if we have brought you closer
together with a friend, we want to hear about that.
That's always very nice to hear about. Um. You can
let us know by tweeting to us on Twitter. Our
(36:56):
handle is s y s K podcast. We're on face
book dot com at Facebook dot com slash stuff. You
should know. You can send us an email to just
Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. That's close and then
of course we have a little abode do web uh
stuff you should know dot com for more on this
(37:21):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com brought to you by the all new teen
Toyota Corolla
Brought to you by the all New Toyota Corolla. Welcome
to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff, Work Stops
dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
That's Charles W. Chuck. Chucker's Bryant. This is stuff you
(00:22):
should know. You can just call us MAV and Goose
for this one. No you can't. Okay, okay, it depends
who's MAV and who's Goose. Well, the the re email,
I said that it's very appropriate for the show. Why
because Goose died because his ejection seed malfunction. I know
(00:42):
he hit his head on the canopy. I know I
broke his neck. Is because he'd angered God earlier that day,
I guess so, so I'll be Goose. Are you planning
on dying? I'm just planning on you feeling guilt for
the rest of your life. You caused the spin by
being a guns blazing maverick. That is true, but I
(01:03):
would be like, I didn't design the injection seat. That's
the guy who should feel guilty for the rest of
his life. I'm gonna go get a taco. Um. Yeah,
I'm gonna go ride my motorcycle around Miramar. It's funny.
When I saw top Gun, and I may have talked
about this before, I remember thinking at the time, like, people,
you don't die in training exercises like that, that's so hollywood.
It up as a matter of fact, that happened very
(01:25):
well two years ago. It happens all the time. You
never hear about it. Yeah, there's the guys that make
the papers, my paper. It doesn't. It's sad that it doesn't,
but uh, yeah, like it. It happens. Our military died
during training and it's it's awful. My brother in law
is a helicopter pilos, you know, and he's lost several
(01:47):
friends through the years in training. Yeah. Is it in
crashes or from ejection seats crashes? Yeah? Um, there was
a guy in two thousand and eleven. You know the
Blue Angels, the what there's also the Red Arrows. Yeah,
I know the Blue Angels. Okay, Well the Red Arrows
um are another formation flying team, like just basically some
(02:09):
really great pilots, and one of them was killed when
his ejection seat went off while his plane was motionless.
The ejection seat just accidentally went off. That's a zero
zero ejection and that what that's called. Yes, but that
means you're on the ground and you're not flying at all. Right, Um,
but I think the problem is the plane didn't realize
where the ejection. Um, the sequencer didn't realize that it
(02:33):
was a zero zero ejection because the paras you never deployed.
So he died when he fell back down to earth
from a couple hundred feet out. I guess, yeah, well,
well this all makes sense in a second. Um. You
know what I think as a primer before, if you're
at home listening, you can go to the YouTube site
and look up, look up like ejection seat and there's
(02:57):
one like slow motion on the ground zero zero ejection
from film from different angles that really shows how it
all works. It's pretty cool and um, you really get
a sense of like what they do, go up a
couple hundred feet Yeah, and quick too, very quick. Um.
This so this is this is not even my intro.
I've got an intro, Chuck. There's a guy in World
(03:22):
War Two who is a tail gunner on a B
seventeen flying Fortress. And this man's name was Alan McGhee,
who's staff sergeant. And if you were a tail gunner
on the B seventeen, you were basically cramped into this
little gun turret with your knees up to your chest,
your heads poking out in a little clear canopy shell. Yes,
(03:44):
and you had no room whatsoever to wear a parachute.
You had to keep it in the cockpit with everybody else. Well.
Alan McGee is on this B seventeen called the Snap
Crackle Pop, and they're flying on a mission over France.
Satan is there, which was also known as Flack City
(04:04):
because of the anti aircraft guns down on the ground.
And sure enough, the Snap Crackle Pop took some flak lost.
A wing had a couple of holes in it, and
these holes in turn put holes into McGee's parachute. So
he needs to bail out. He finds a hole that's
(04:25):
been blown into the side of the the Snap Crackle
Pop and jumps out at twenty thousand feet with a
parachute with holes in it, with no parachute whatsoever, because
he was like why bother. He just knew he needed
to get out of the plane quick and he later
said that he thought he had a parachute. Yes, He
fall twenty two thousand feet more than four miles to
(04:50):
the ground, goes right through the skylight in the satan
Asaire Trades train station and Lands and Lives. He had
a um how does that happen? He had I'll tell
you a second. He had a broken right leg, broken
right ankle, nearly severed right arm, twenty eight shrapnel wounds
from the shards of glass because he fell right through
(05:12):
plate glass from again twenty two thousand ft four miles
above the ground, and he lived to tell about it.
A German doctor apparently took very good care of him,
and he later on said, you know, publicly thanked the guy,
even though he was a Nazi doctor, um for saving
his life. And so I'm reading about this and this
(05:33):
is just astounding. I'm looking into it more and more
and more, and there's no trick. It's just physics. Um.
This physicist Dr Seth Eisenberg, he's not a physicist, he's
a trauma specialist. He said on Popular Mechanics that there's
really no magic here. That he was going. McGee was
(05:53):
going as fast as he would have been had he
jumped off of something like a twelve story building. Once
you reach terminal velocity, it's all the same, whether it's
four miles or whether it's twenty feet. Um, it's still
pretty spectacular that he fell four miles through the roof
of a building and survived. The point of all this
(06:17):
is so the point was though, that he could have
fallen off a twelve story building through the plate glasses
and everyone had been like, Wow, that's pretty awesome, but
not miraculous. Yeah, compared to four miles it's not. Okay,
I got you. It's still be pretty miraculous that he survived.
Used to die, you know, twelve story building. He's pretty
banged up. Yeah, So the point is him just jumping
(06:37):
out of the the hole in the side of the
snap crackle pop was not that different from how you
would get out of a plane in World War Two.
You just kind of opened up the canopy and jumped
out and then you know, opened your parachute at the
appropriate height right or altitude. When that's fine with planes,
(06:58):
propeller planes, but once jets were introduced, you can't do
that because they're going so much faster than a propeller
plane does. You can't just jump out speed of sound, dude.
So around the time the jet age began, a company
named Martin Baxter, a British aviation company, started really looking
into the idea of the ejection seat, and we have
(07:21):
that today thanks in large part to them. Hats off, Yeah,
real men of genius. Uh So. An ejection seat, if
you don't know, just to put it very simply, is
a seat that is ejected from the aircraft ob jet,
can be a helicopter. Um. And it's a very much
(07:42):
a last second maybe not last second, but it's the
last ditch effort to save yourself when you know that
that aircraft is going down, right, Yeah, it's the that's
your last resort. You don't do that frivolously because number one,
airplanes are expense Yeah, they're also very dangerous when they
(08:02):
crash land. Yeah, and you really I think it's probably
bad form to scuttle your plane when you still have
control of it. Yeah, I think so. Like, hey, I
wonder what this thing does. Um. And the article points
out and it's once you really read this thing, it's
really true. It's one of the most complex parts of
an aircraft. Could be thousands of parts in some of these,
(08:24):
and the object is to get the pilot out and
then disattached from that seat without hitting any part of
the aircraft. So like up and out in a way
out of harm's way, at which point, um you become
a parachuter. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. You want to
get the pilot into the position to just parachute down
(08:44):
into the ground, and it all happens and under four seconds,
and about two to three of those seconds is the
actual parachute aspect, Like the ejection part is all in
about a second and a second and a half. It's
pretty pretty amazing, and we're gonna tell you how it works.
So the process of it is fairly simple. The procedure, right,
(09:06):
it's like, just get the pilot out of the plane
above it, out of the way of the plane crash, yeah,
and let the parachute happen to its thing. Right. But
when you look at the mechanisms involved in this, it's
extremely detailed, especially since when you had the first microprocessor
(09:26):
in charge of ejection seats. It's really neat. Yes, So
let's talk about ejection seats. Let's talk about the basics.
You've got. First of all, the seat, Yes, the seat
is connected. It's in the cockpit obviously, and it's attached
to rails um by by way of some rollers. So
you might think like the seats just like bolted to
the floor. It's not. It's on rollers on these rails
(09:48):
because those rails and rollers are going to do the
initial guidance of the chair at the proper angle out
of the aircraft. Right. You can't just go up, you
can't just go forward, you can't just go back right.
And when you go up those rails, you actually have
to go at a certain amount of speed, and that
(10:09):
speed has to be slightly more than the aircraft is
going or else you're not going to clear the cockpit. Yeah,
So to do that, you have what's called the catapult,
which is usually a charge. Yeah, that's what gets you
going up the rails and initially out. Um. Then there
will be a secondary rocket that that shoots you up
(10:30):
another couple of hundred feet and clear the tail of
the plane and everything. Um. And it does it quick too,
It does it really quick. And this is all This
whole system is called an A E S and Assisted
Egress system egress meaning exit or a way out. Um,
little on the nose, but I get it. Yeah, that's
the military. Um. And Uh, the canopy is you know,
(10:52):
if you've ever seen like a fighter jet, they've got
the clear clear canopy above them where they like wave
and like give the thumbs upside in the black Power
sign and all that stuff. Yeah, where they shoot a
bird at the Russian is in top Gun. Remember they
flew right on the upside down right above them. That
seemed almost incredible. It's very incredible. Yeah, and probably not real. Well,
(11:13):
that's what I mean, Tony Scott r I p um.
So you got the canopy, and the problem with the
canopy is it shouldn't be there when you're trying to eject.
It's right, So part of the assisted egre system is
the canopy actually uh blowing and getting the heck out
of the way. If you don't have a canopy, you
might have an escape hatch built into the roof. And um.
(11:38):
You do all this by pulling a lever either between
your legs or by your side or in the case
of Top Gun. I looked at the clip today. It's
too two loops behind their head that they pulled. Or
sometimes you might pull a face curtain down in front
of your face, which serves two purposes. It gets the
whole system moving and protects your face. And it's not
like a veil, no, it's like it's sturdy. Yeah. Well,
(12:03):
and I think of, like, you know what I think
of when I think of curtain and planes, I think
of like what they used to separate first class from
from coach. We don't want this to bereta. So here's
this black Lacey. He's like, I don't. I don't want
to see having to bail out. So those are some
of the ways. You know, there's all different kinds of systems,
but that's generally how it works. Okay, so we got
the general part before we go. Any let's do a
(12:25):
message break and let's do that. Yeah. They's about to
get really good though. Mm hm. Okay, So them's the basics.
We're talking about the basics. Yeah, let's get into the
nuts and bolts of this as it were. Yeah, and
(12:46):
bolts will come into play actually specifics. Um. So let's
talk about the seat. You've got your bucket, which is
where you sit. Um it. Also the seat comes with
survival equipment, which is kind of nice. Yeah, I licked
it up. Some survival packs have like oxygen, so if
you are bailing out and you're you're not attest to
oxygen at a high altitude, you're gonna need it. Um.
(13:08):
They have rifles in them. Which is just cool um blankets.
What I don't get is the seat ejects from the person.
So is the safety pack this stays attest Okay, so
you're still in a sitting position with this thing attached
to you or it's a test your back Okay, Yeah,
I was confused by that too. I'm glad you took
the time. Um, we cover the canopy. The catapult is
(13:31):
obviously what initiates it, and it's operated with, like you said,
ballistic cartridge. There's a lot of explosions going. You're riding
a bullet right then, yeah, pretty much, then you're going
to catapult the rails. You got your drug parachute, which
is a small parachute five two to five ft in
diameter that it initially pops out to uh, sort of
(13:52):
balance you and make sure you're not just flying all
over the place and slow you down a little bit,
right because I mean, if you're going in at even
a slight angle at the speed of sound, possibly, yes,
you need to slow down kind of quick. And the
drug parachute is just that little one like uh, then
the drags that's exactly what it is. And sometimes you
(14:13):
know how they'll have like a small one, and then
a big one. They have that too on injection seats
as well. And then the drug parachute also very commonly,
um will trip the larger parachute too after a certain
speed is reached. That's right. Um, what else, man, You've
got your environmental sensor, which will get into how all
this works. Um, But that is a device that tracks
(14:35):
airspeed and altitude. Um, it doesn't just shoot you up
and say I hope it's hope it's okay up there
right exactly? And then it also depending on the readings
it gets for your air speed and altitude, it'll it'll
trip like a certain type of sequence. So like if
you're at a very high altitude, there'll be a certain sequence.
If you're at a low altitude but going a very
(14:57):
fast speed, there will be a certain sequence, and so on.
And there's a car called modes of ejection. Well we
might as well go and cover that. It's Um, there's
something called and I had to look this up. It
was named for physicists Honree Peito, but um, everyone calls
them uh pedd or pidot tubes when it really should
(15:23):
be Peto tubes because he was French. But these are
when the when the sequence begin, it travels up the
rails and exposes these tubes and they measure air pressure
and the differences in pressure to determine like how fast
you're going and like which of these modes to enact
that we're talking about. So that that's the that's part
(15:44):
of the environmental center, and it sends that information of
the recovery sequencer, which is basically the chip that controls
the process. That's right. Um, So what are the three modes? Well,
there's low altitude low speed, which is less than two
fifty knots at less than fifteen thousand feet. No need
for a drug parachute. You barely even need an injection
seed at that point, you know. Um. There's mode too,
(16:07):
which is low altitude high speed for when you're like,
you know, Maverick or something like that, just going really
fast but low UM. And then there's high altitude any speed,
known as the scariest mode. Right. And so the modes
are all based on you'll notice two things altitude and
(16:29):
um speed velocity right. Um. And you put these things
together and you create a graph and inside the graph,
inside the the arc that's formed that's called the envelope,
and anything inside the envelope is um safety. Like it's
(16:52):
been proven, it's tested that if you follow this certain
sense of certain sequence of events for this mode, within
this altitude and this air speed, you're gonna most likely
be fine. That's right. If you go outside of that,
you are what's known as pushing the envelope. Is that
where that came from? That's awesome? It is. I thought
(17:14):
that was when you, like, we're super cool during negotiations
and you would just write down what you wanted and
push the envelope across the table. That's pushing your luck. Okay, wow,
I love that. You know me and word origins. Yeah,
I thought you'd like that when I saw it, and
I was like, Jack's gonna love it. So let's back
up a bit and uh start with with the bailout.
(17:36):
Your planes not doing well, you want to eject planes.
Not your plane is sick. You want to eject and
you pull the ejection handle. That sets off what we've
already talked about, that first explosion to catapult you up
the rails and into the air. And then there is
an under seat rocket motor that actually propels you even further.
(17:58):
And when you watch this thing in slow motion. It's
you know, serious rocket propelled action going on under your butt. Yeah,
and sometimes it's two stages, like the catapult and then
the rocket, but it's all in the same source. But yeah,
it's basically shot shooting you. So you go off on
a bullet and then a rocket. Yeah, that's what happens
(18:18):
when you're ejecting in like you said, within the first
half to one and a half seconds. Yeah, that's what
all this happens in the canopy obviously has been jettisoned
at this point, and that's a really cool thing to Like,
these things are have to functions canopy, so they're bolted
in there, and the way they're they're ejected as the
bolts are blown by little tiny explosive charges, right, that's
(18:40):
called lifting the canopy. Um, the bolts will blow and
the cannon people start to fly off, but then there's
another charge and another explosion towards the front that just
shoots it off in another direction away from you as
you're ejecting. All this is just so cool, man, how
fast it happens, how complicated it all is. Yeah, because
think about that, Like the computer sequencers still needs to
(19:02):
know what mode to follow, so like when that canopy
is starting to blow, it's taking the data readings and
deciding all this is going on in like a second,
a tenth of a seconded um. So lifting the canopy
is one way you can still become injured. You can
still run into the canopy, um I, just from blowing
the bolts. So there's another mode, um or another means
(19:24):
of getting rid of the canopy. And that's just shattering it. Yeah,
that's when it basically explodes. And uh, it's like you've
got chicken wire, but the chicken wire is explosive. Yeah,
just just evaporate. Yeah, well done, evaporate the slipstream. Just
makes it go by by really quickly. Um So for
all intents and purposes. Uh. And then we also mentioned
(19:47):
earlier if there is no canopy, there will be an
explosive hatch that basically that's the same thing that seems
the least safe to me, why because you can't see
through it. An explosive hatch makes me think of like
some really heavy thick steel that, yes, you can't see through,
and that is just really a hole in another bit
of heavy thick steel that you might bump into on
(20:09):
your way out, like like an escape hatch from a submarine.
That's what I think of when I think of a
hatch like that on a plane. You know, give me
a shattering canopy. You want it to dissolve above your head. Evaporate, evaporate. Alright,
So then once you're out from the rails, uh, that
(20:29):
secondary the rocket's gonna take you depends on your weight
A hundred to two hundred feet up to safe safely
clear you and um, I wish we had more recent
stats than this, but we have one from that said
that they had a success rate or I saw that
four d and sixty three injections. I saw that that's
a kind of standard for study from like I think
(20:51):
two thousand six or something like that, and they found
about eighty nine point four. And the bad news is
the other ten percent means you've probably died. Yeah, you know,
so it's either success or you die. Yes, I think
that's pretty much the I think saving your life through
the correct series is successful. Like if you're injured or whatever,
(21:13):
I think they still generally count that as success. Um.
So where are we man? So we're at the drug parachute.
The drug gun fires a metal slug and it pulls
out this little drug parachute. And then like we said,
then there's the secondary shoot that I think the drug
nnects that, right, yeah, the second they like the main shoot. UM,
(21:35):
so you get the main shoot out before this happens. Though.
Think about this when you are shot out on a
bullet and then on a rocket and you're going up
to I don't know, mark two, mark three, MAK one
is seven. UM. That's speed of sound like supersonic travel. Um.
(21:58):
And we have planes that can go a lot faster
than that. When you exit the plane like that, UM,
it's very easy for your seat to start to tumble
and move around and spin or your limbs. Let's say,
well we'll get to that. Just the seat itself. If
everything's going encoding, the plant plant can still tumble and
and this the wind resistance it meets can just push
(22:20):
it around in all sorts of weird angles. So there's
something called a Vernier rocket, right, and it's it is
a rocket that just kind of fires like um, remember
on Apollo thirteen when they were um like shooting off
the little booster rockets like need correct the yaw and
all that and pitch. That's what this rocket does. UM.
(22:44):
Or these rockets, I should say. It stabilizes the seat
and keeps it from spinning and tumbling and makes it
stay up and down exactly so it knows what it's doing,
just like your smartphone. Oh, yes, that what the compass
thing is. Yeah really well, I mean yeah, plus when
you tilted, it knows to go sideways. And yeah, I
(23:06):
mean I'm sure that or I hope the dejection seats
have a little more advanced systems. But yeah, gyroscope. Yeah, okay,
I never thought about that. Uh, maybe not a gyroscope,
but something that functions in that way. People are like,
that's not a gyroscope. We'll find out, Yeah, we sure,
well many times over. Okay, so Chuck, let's talk about
(23:26):
the physics of all this. Well, first we got to
cover the seat man separator motor. And that's actually once
you're in the air, you don't you're you don't want
you can't land in the seat. They wanted to get
you out of the seat, and that's accomplished by the
seat man motor separator. Yeah. This motor dease basically goes
we're and detaches the seat from you and you're you've
(23:49):
got your parachute one, You've got your survival pack still,
but the seat just kind of falls away to Earth
and you just um slowly parachute down and land and
if you're keptain scott O Grady, Yeah, then you spend
the next five days evading serbs. That's right, successfully successfully.
(24:13):
So physics my favorite topic. I know you love physics. Uh.
Newton's second law of emotion comes into play here obviously
because um force and acceleration of the crew member. Really,
you know, that's how you're gonna live or die. Yeah,
because when you exited plane, you get smacked by the wind,
that's right. I mean, you're going faster than the speed
(24:35):
of sound, and while you're normally operating the plane, the
plane's taking it on the chin for you. You're not
feeling this force of gravity nearly as much as you
are when you're no longer surrounded by the plane and
you're just exposed up there in the atmosphere. That's right.
So Newton's second law of emotion states the acceleration of
(24:56):
an object depends on the force acting upon it and
the mass of the object. Force equals mass times acceleration.
In this case, the mass is the mass of the
human pilot and the chair, right, and uh, the force Uh,
I don't know. Accelerations measured in gees right, So one
(25:16):
G equals the the amount of one the the amount
of the Earth's gravity right now, right. And so let's say, um,
let's say we're a hundred and eighty pound pilot at
sea level, we weigh a hundred and eighty pounds. That's
one g um when we're going t gs and so
(25:37):
on up to say twenty g s I believe, is
what the an ejection seat is like the best are
developed for At twenty g's hundred and eighty pounds, it
feels like thirty pounds. That's the force that you encounter
when you eject thirty pounds, All of a sudden of
(25:58):
force is being exerted on your body. Yeah, and keeping
in mind that one g of acceleration is equal to
thirty two per scond. Yes, And it all depends on
how much we weigh, like, that's how you figure out
the mass you in the chair. That's the big one. Also,
the the chair needs to know how fast to go
because it has to go slightly faster than the plane,
like I said, so it can clear it. That's amazing, Yeah,
(26:19):
it is. But when So when you reject and you
suddenly encounter twenty g s, which is the upper limits
of human Um, what's the word I'm looking for? Tolerance? Um,
A lot of really bad things can happen to you.
That's right, and we know this thanks for our buddy
(26:40):
Colonel step Yeah. Remember he used to have read outs
from the rocket sled and man he had some crazy
stuff happened to him. So what's the formula? UM speed
equals acceleration times time plus initial speed or v F
equals a T plus the I. Yes, So think about this. Okay,
(27:02):
what we just said is that, UM, we understand the force,
which is when you go up, you are suddenly exposed
to that lateral force, hit in the face with that
windy um, and you're also being pushed out and upward.
So I think you said that in some cases, within
(27:24):
the first second and a half you are up two feet,
So I think you said earlier something like you within
a second you are you go from sitting in the
plane to being up about two feet, So that means
you're traveling twot a second upward. So you're being pushed
(27:45):
up like that while you're being exposed to speeds of
upwards of seven twenty g's of force. UM. And all
of this is happening to your poor little body, so
a lot of really bad things can happen to it. Um,
first of all, First and foremost, I think the number
(28:06):
one injury from ejections is spine compression, oh man, Because
you're you're being pushed upward at a two ft a
second UM. That's a lot of force exerted on your
spinal column. So modern um ejection seats have things like
leg restraints, back restraints, restraints, and then that face curtain
(28:28):
restrain your head, and you were forced into a completely
up and down sitting position so that your vertebra are
stacked perfectly on top of one another, because any kind
of slip or any kind of angle leads to a
slip disc very easily. UM. And there's a long standing legend.
I couldn't verify that in the US Air Force, after
(28:51):
two or three ejections you're grounded for life because the
spinal compressions just basically used you up. I don't know,
I didn't see that it was true anywhere, but it's
an old legend. Well, at the very least, you're not
very good pilot, so they're like, yeah, maybe we should
around them. Or you're like three quarters your height that
you were when you enlisted because the final compressions, you know,
(29:13):
short now. So that's the number one I believe UM
injury that comes from ejection. There's also something with the
horrific name limb flail. So you're secured in your seat,
your arms, your legs, your head, you're supposed to be
totally immobile in that first couple of seconds, especially until
your parachute opens and you slow down and everything. If
(29:36):
your arm gets loose. Have you ever seen a dog
with its head sticking out of a car window on
a highway and it has real long, floppy ears, Yeah,
which is very dangerous. It's not something you should do
to your dog. It's bad for your dog. Developed cauliflowerer.
It's a bad thing to do. Get things in their eyes.
That's going like thirty to sixty miles an hour. We're
(29:58):
talking in arm a human r going more than seven
fifty miles. When it gets loose, what you have is
called limb flail, and what you have are completely shattered bones,
dislocated shoulders. Um, that's a bad jam. Or just imagine
going down the highway at like rolled on your window
(30:18):
and then quickly to stick your arms. Yes, yes, and
multiply that times you know whatever. Um, so that's another
type of injury limb flail. Um. There's wind blast, which
so they tested this on chimps of course, and um
it turns out that you can get third degree burns,
severe third degree burns just from the wind at um
(30:42):
mock one point seven. Being exposed to that peak one
point seven mack one point seven for one second can
give you severe third degree burns. Uh. And then there's tumbling,
which you might overlook, but think about this. Remember when
um know, the real math, No, the real life guys. No, uh,
(31:05):
the dude, oh man, No, the guy who jumped out
of the space capsule recently. You know the guy, yeah,
Felix bomb Gardener. Yeah, I can't believe I forgot that. Um.
The the when he jumped out, he started to tumble,
remember he started going in over end a first. No.
(31:27):
And the reason that that is really really bad is
because you can build up centrifugal force of your for
your blood and it pushes it outward to your extremities,
meaning your heart doesn't have any blood to pump any longer,
so you can die very quickly. I've seen between two
hundred and four hundred rotations per minute proves fatal to humans. Man,
(31:49):
how did that bomb grown? Your guy pull that off?
I don't know. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, and hey,
our own Discovery channel covered that live. Remember, Yeah, that
was huge. It was very cool. That first shot, Dude,
I like, I can't look at that when it just
falls out of it at his perspective shot when he
was just like all right, I'm jumping out of something
from space. Yeah, that was amazing. I remember, um, you,
(32:11):
me and I were coming back from some trip or
whatever and we just happened to be in the airport
when I remembered it was going on. I'm like, oh, yeah,
we should watch this, and ended up standing there watching
like one of the most amazing things I've ever seen
in my entire life. Yeah, I mean, that was just
an amazing thing to see. Yeah, and I bet you
he wants to top it. I'm sure he's like high
or still. Yeah. And do you remember the guy who
(32:32):
did that in like the like nineteen sixty or the
late fifties. Oh, he did it like in this exposed
weather balloon wearing like a high altitude a halo mask
and air supply and everything, and you've seen footage of it, yes,
but he ended up being like the whole program director
(32:52):
for Felix baum Gardner's jump, Like he tapped him because
he's the only other guy who's done anything like that,
and this guy did it in like the eight fifties,
I think, so he was literally the only person he
could say, what's it? Like? Manly? He said, it sucks
and it's awesome. Apparently he had like a hole in
his glove or something like that that they had he
told them back on the ground what was going on,
(33:13):
they would have called off the mission. And no, the
other guy and he just didn't tell him. So that's
how Felix bond Gardner works. Alright, Ejection Seats, you've got
anything else? I don't have anything else. Yeah, that one
was really cool. I thought, Yeah, very complex thing going
on very quickly, and watch that super slow mo and
(33:35):
then it shows it in regular time. It's pretty neat. Okay,
So since we don't have anything else, um, we would
advise you to go onto the how Stuff Works website
and check out ejection Seats. Type that into the search bar,
and since I said search bar, it is time for
listener mail. Yeah, I'm gonna call this b FF. Hey, guys,
I've been listening for about six months and catching up
(33:58):
on most of your old shows. In that time. I
was introduced to your podcast by my best since sixth
grade friend, who was also a serious fan. I admit
that it took me a few episodes to warm to
your podcast, and now I feel a bit cheapish for
ever doubting my friends recommendation. Not only is she one
of the smartest people I've ever met, She's one of
my oldest friends. It knows me better than anyone. We
(34:20):
have a long history of directing each other to many
fabulous and geekye pursuits, but stuff you should know, maybe
the best of them all. And I have to say,
stiff competition. You're up against Tolkin, the X Files, Star Trek,
epic rat battles of History, Dune. She says, we talk
all of those. Wow, I mean I see the rat battles, sure,
(34:43):
Dune maybe, but tolkan X Files Star Trek. Although I
don't like Star Trek, you don't like Start check the movie,
the TV shows, none of it. People are gonna be shocked.
I've never seen a single Star Trek episode in my life.
I think I did when I was a kid. Now,
I'll bet I would like it as an adult now.
And I saw the Wrath of con Yeah, I saw
(35:04):
that finally. That was good. And then I saw the
the first of the new ones, but not the one
that just came out. I saw the one that just
came out. It's pretty good. Yeah, I mean, I'll get
into it. It's just not my universe. I'm Star Wars guy.
Not that you can't be, you know, get over this
this obstacle, this arbitrary and totally unnecessary wall between people
(35:26):
who like Star Trek and Star Wars. Uh. It's it's
not that I think there should be a wall. I
just never got into Star Trek as long as it's
you're not hating on Star trekah, No, of course, not
ak trick. All right, this has been like kind of
a geeky episode, have you noticed? Sure? Back to the
(35:51):
email from Catherine. A couple of months ago, my friend
came to visit for a weekend and we were discussing
the podcast. Both made similar comments about why enjoyed it
so much. I felt like we had two really great
and interesting friends with us whenever we wanted them or
needed them. We both worked long hours and jobs with
significant pressure, and sometimes time with great and interesting friends
(36:12):
it's hard to come by. Your podcast can be a
great band aid in maintaining sanity when face to face
interaction with real friends isn't possible. So thanks for being
such wonderful imaginary stand in slash other appropriate adjective friends,
and keep up a good work explaining like the universe
and everything. Best Catherine with the k R y N, Well,
(36:35):
thanks a lot. And she didn't say what her friend's
name was with I thought it was quite sounds like
a pretty bad friend, So Catherine's friend, hats off to
you as well. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thanks for
listening you guys. Um, if we have brought you closer
together with a friend, we want to hear about that.
That's always very nice to hear about. Um. You can
let us know by tweeting to us on Twitter. Our
(36:56):
handle is s y s K podcast. We're on face
book dot com at Facebook dot com slash stuff. You
should know. You can send us an email to just
Stuff Podcast at Discovery dot com. That's close and then
of course we have a little abode do web uh
stuff you should know dot com for more on this
(37:21):
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