Science: Positively Wizard

Fully 94% of the Navy’s pilots who have to bail out below 1,000 ft. during landings and take-offs are killed because they do not have time to get out of their planes and open their parachutes. Last week the Navy gave a spectacular demonstration of a British ejection seat that may become the American carrier pilot’s best friend: even at minimum altitudes the seat automatically ejects the pilot and opens his chute.

Whistling at 140 m.p.h. down a runway at the U.S. Naval Air Test Center on Maryland’s Patuxent River, a Grumman F9F-8T fighter-trainer barely had its nose wheel off the concrete when a short, stocky R.A.F. officer riding in the seat behind the pilot got the signal to bail out. Flying Officer Sidney Hughes reached above his head and yanked a handle. The pull snapped down a black curtain (to protect his face from wind blast) and fired three cartridges beneath his seat. Half a second after Hughes was catapulted straight out of the plane, another cartridge fired to drag out a 22-in. chute, which pulled out a 60-in. chute. The second chute, in turn, pulled out the main, 24-ft. chute as the seat fell away.

By the time his main chute opened, Hughes was down to 40 ft., although he had somersaulted as high as 101 ft. A bare six seconds after he reached for his handle. Hughes hit a plowed field at the end of the runway. For a long second he lay still. Then he bounced up and started to shake hands with the crowd of Navymen that sprinted up to him. ”You feel a terrific crash on your rump, and the next thing, you are out on the end of your chute,” gasped Hughes. “I feel wizard, though. Positively wizard!”

Secretary of the Navy Thomas S. Gates Jr. and his flight-safety experts were delighted at the first live trial of the Martin-Baker ejection seat in this country (it has been successfully tried once in England—TIME, Sept. 19. 1955), hopefully predicted that the device would cut pilot fatality rates. Last year more than half the Navy’s 277 pilot fatalities stemmed from take-offs or landings. “At the end of the runway, if something goes wrong, the pilot up to now has been helpless,” said Rear Admiral Thurston B. Clark, commander of the test center. “We tell them to ‘shut your eyes and go straight ahead.’ This seat is the greatest invention since the parachute.” The Navy is installing the seat (cost: about $2,500 each) in 50 Grumman F9F-8T fighter-trainers.