Science: High Jump

“Suppose you were the pilot of a single-seat jet fighter . . . scooting across the sky at 40,000 ft. or higher at more than 600 m.p.h., and suppose something went wrong. . . . How would you ‘get out?’ ” The problem is posed by Hanson W. Baldwin in this week’s New York Times magazine.

“It sounds simple,” says Baldwin. But no one has done it yet. First step is to “dump” the transparent bubble canopy over your pressurized cockpit. “When your cover goes off you are subjected to what the doctors call ‘explosive decompression’ . . . the gas and air in your lungs and belly and muscles must escape and expand. They go out of you in a great whoosh; your lips flutter . . . and your body feels as if it were ‘getting a great thrust from all directions.’ “

Out with a Bang. Human bodies can stand this alarming torment. But now comes the problem of getting out of the cockpit. “Climb out and jump?” Baldwin asks. “Try it in a plane making 600 miles an hour. . . . You can’t move; the wind plasters you into your seat. … So what do you do?”

Wright Field has been experimenting with a pilot’s seat that is shot out of the cockpit, pilot and all, by a 37-mm. shell. The difficulty is getting the seat out fast enough to clear the plane, but not so fast that the sudden acceleration will injure the human spine or break the hip bones. The prospects for this look fairly good. Wright Field workers have proved by experiments on themselves, says Baldwin, “that a man can take even the forces of 20 ‘Gs’ [20 times the force of gravity] on his hip bones for a very short period without damage.”

Down without Effort. Once you’re out, Baldwin says, there isn’t enough air to breathe. A special bottle of oxygen may fix that. But the “opening shock” at high altitudes is too great to risk. It is better to fall into denser air before using the parachute. Wright Field has developed a gadget that opens the chute at the proper altitude, whether the pilot is conscious or not.

These various devices, each of which must work perfectly if the pilot is to survive, have not yet been tested at maximum conditions of altitude and speed. But the U.S. Air Force hopes to try them out soon on a human volunteer.