Reminiscing Over the 'Bang' Seat, by Neil McGowan

It’s been a funny few weeks for me. After my week off last month, I managed to catch a rather unpleasant bug and ended up in bed for a week. On the plus side, this gave me a lot of time to read (as I couldn’t do much more than that).

It kept me sane (I get rather grumpy when unwell, as I don’t like to be inactive, and I knew I had a fair few jobs planned for the garden), and at least allowed me to make inroads into the huge TBR pile we have – last count had over 500 books still to be read…

I also jumped about genres and styles, from horror, to crime fiction, with drama and science fiction in the mix somewhere. But one of the books I most enjoyed was a work of non-fiction, by John Nichol (the navigator from the Tornado shot down during the first Gulf War), called Eject! Eject!.

Pauline, my wife, picked this up for my birthday, thinking it would interest me as I used to work on ejection seats.

It’s a fascinating read, charting the development of egress systems from the earliest trials (known as 'bang' seats) through to modern day seats that can make the decision to eject far quicker than the pilot so that in under a second, they are floating beneath a parachute 300 feet above their jet. I knew the basics of most of the history, but what appealed was the way developments in the technology were paired with stories of pilots who’d actually used them in both war and peacetime. The major focus was the Martin Baker ejection seat, but other manufacturers were also covered.

It also did a good job of breaking down the process of ejection into a way that felt accessible, even if you’re not familiar with it – I did wonder when I started how a sequence that takes less than a second could be described without sounding like a dry, dull list. It also didn’t shy away from the dangers of ejecting, and the injuries that ejecting can inflict. It’s never far from your mind that the pilot is basically sitting on a live rocket that will give them a massive kick in the rear. Spinal compression injuries were common in the earlier days due to the forces involved.

I even managed to get slightly misty-eyed with reminiscence towards the end, when the type of seats I worked on most were under discussion (type 10, in the Tornado) – there was a reproduction of the seat dressing process with all the parts labelled, and a copy of the pre-flight checklist. It’s a remarkably short checklist, compared to some systems, for the simple reason it’s one of only two systems on an aircraft you never test (and the other is canopy jettison, which is related) but which must work when required.

I actually still have one of my old flight line notebooks containing this very checklist, some completed and a few blank pages towards the end. It’s been almost twenty years since I worked on them, and I can still remember the exact process; as Pauline said to me, you tend to be very careful with things that go bang, as you don’t generally get to make a second mistake…