F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash

It risks career. 2 ejections and you won’t fly for the military any more.

Even if the ejections happened with no fault on your part?

Also isn't there like 5-10% fatality rate?

I went to an ejected pilot call when I worked in EMS. Guy was ok but protocol was handle as potential spinal injury. The force of ejecting puts a lot of compression on intervertebral discs and the effect is cumulative so more ejections means more chance of trashing your back.

It depends on why and your medicals. There's not hard limit of 2.

I think it's about health concerns

Your spine doesn't care why an ejection happened.

I'm surprised they don't design the seats such that they pop out two bars under your armpit so that you transfer some of the forces into your shoulder and collar bone instead of just the spine.

Same way car seat belts horribly injure people if they let it rest on their stomachs instead of on their hips.

That might also be influenced by the situation which necessitated the ejection. Ejecting in optimal conditions could have a 0.1% fatality rate (not a real statistic), but cases of ejecting from a disintegrating plane at 100 feet probably aren't as safe.

I guess trashing a couple hundred million dollars is a occasionally considered an issue

tho looking at how contracts have traditionally been funded you’d be forgiven for thinking it wasn’t

These things are rocket powered and deploy in milliseconds. That sounds like a great way to exit the plane without your arms.

Not a bad idea at face value but as opposed to seatbelts it introduces additional complexity that has to handle every eventuality including G forces from any direction, and still function perfectly. Probably has failure modes that increase injury risk. But this isn't a bad line of thought to go down, ultimately.

Not with modern Martin-Baker seats. IIRC since 2000, something like 800 ejections have happened, of which one lead to a fatality, which was caused by improper maintenance to the seat. (Martin-Baker was chastised for not warning maintainers of the specific risks of overtightening certain bolts above printed spec.)

When Russians were still flying planes deep over Ukraine, they have something like a 50% fatality rate on ejection, but that might be exacerbated by Ukrainian locals often finding the ejected pilots before any military force does, and people getting bombed have historically not liked the people flying the bombers much. When a pilot on the ground has a lot of bruises and a snapped neck, it's often hard to identify whether that happened during the ejection, during the landing, or after. And even when the cause was clearly violence, the emergency services might not be overly interested in blaming anyone or anything but the seat.

The forces involved would only pop your shoulders and not provide any support for your back via your underarm. And the speed the bars would need to come out at, might end up inside your chest cavity. The ejection seats are a last ditch save from certain death. I’d take the loss of an inch or two to my height than the alternative.

It’s a massive issue - crashes are investigated and it’s not uncommon for a pilot to lose their jobs if they deviate from procedures. A few years back, a Marine Colonel was relieved of a prestigious command after being found to have ejected too early:

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/10/31/pilot-of-f-35...

1) It's too fast.

2) Think your shoulders could take it?? It's IIRC ~15g.

I do think they probably could make a gentler ejection mode as the seats are built for the worst case. The lower your airspeed the longer you have to get high enough to clear the tail and thus less acceleration is needed.

Note that that was the third review. The first two exonerated him--the real problem was his helmet wigged out. His plane was actually flyable but it was lying to him. And the rule was if the plane is not responding properly to pilot commands below 6,000' AGL eject.

And note the situation over Ukraine. There are systems like the Patriot--you do not want to be above the horizon to one of them. But so long as you're some distance from the launcher and stay very low the Patriot can't see you. But that puts you very much in danger from stuff like a Stinger and when one finds your engine you're going to go in very, very fast.