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If you don't have an ejection seat, getting kicked out of your seat inside a cockpit doesn't sound terribly helpful. Inflight breakup situations where the pilot
by teleclimber 12y ago
If you don't have an ejection seat, getting kicked out of your seat inside a cockpit doesn't sound terribly helpful. Inflight breakup situations where the pilot breaks free in their seat are so rare that this would probably would cause more accidents than it would save lives.
Ejection seats do kick you out of the seat automatically sometime after ejection so that the automatic parachute deployment can work.
- jessaustin 12y agoInflight breakup situations where the pilot breaks free in their seat are so rare... Do intuitions developed about airframe integrity in an aviation context necessarily apply to spaceflight? Normally I wouldn't think automatic chute deployment would have much value without a full ejection seat, although in this case it saved a life. Did the designers of this craft actually have a meeting in which they decided that the likelihood of this exact sort of incident is so much higher than an intact-vehicle incident that an automatic chute is warranted while an ejection seat is not? For some reason I suspect that a couple of years from now we'll be reading a tell-all about the culture of risk-taking at "The Spaceship Company". (Whether such a book is warranted or not.)