00:00You will never experience anything more violent than ejecting out of a fighter jet aircraft.
00:04There is nothing on the planet that comes even close.
00:07The most violent experience of your life, period.
00:12A seriously wounded U.S. Air Force colonel was rescued after ejecting from his shot-down fighter jet over Iran.
00:18Despite his injuries, the F-15E weapons officer evaded capture for 36 hours behind enemy lines after punching out.
00:26What many people don't realize is that ejection can be a shockingly violent and even deadly procedure
00:32that wreaks havoc on the body, potentially shrinking a pilot's height by up to two inches.
00:38But why is ejecting from a fighter jet so traumatic?
00:41We spoke to a former Top Gun pilot to break it down.
00:44My name is Matthew Buckley. My call sign is Wiz.
00:47I flew the F-18 Hornet for the United States Navy for about 15 years.
00:51Graduated from the Navy Fighter Weapons School adversary course, which most people know as Top Gun.
00:56You're always worried about the condition of an aviator or an air crew if they had to eject
01:01because ejecting is one of the most violent experiences a body can go through.
01:06It's literally a choice between death and pulling the yellow and black ejection handles between your legs.
01:13So it's a pretty stark choice, either die or eject.
01:16And in ejection, you go from zero, just sitting here in a chair, to an instantaneous 10 to 20 Gs
01:23of force.
01:23And that's the blink of an eye.
01:25When you pull the handle, in the blink of an eye, about a second to a second and a half,
01:30the canopy goes, the seat fires, and you're hanging in your parachute.
01:34So it's an incredibly violent experience.
01:38So if you're uninjured from the ejection, now you have to land.
01:42And this is going to surprise a lot of folks.
01:44We don't do any parachute training.
01:46A lot of people think that, oh, yeah, if you're a fighter pilot, you must do some parachute training.
01:50Zero.
01:51So it sounds like either this WIZO, the weapons system officer, was injured in the ejection or on the landing.
01:59You know, maybe it was on the landing because this was a pretty rocky and mountainous terrain.
02:04But it sounds like it didn't slow him down because he evaded capture by navigating to the top of a
02:097,000-foot peak
02:11and then establishing contact with friendly forces.
02:14While life-saving, the lightning-fast process of ejecting is inherently brutal.
02:20In order for pilots to make it out of a doomed aircraft, they have to vertically clear the jet,
02:25which can easily be traveling at a few hundred miles per hour.
02:28In order for that to happen, the passenger and its seat are propelled upwards
02:32using an explosive catapult guided by a set of rails at breakneck speed.
02:37This initial explosion, which can knock pilots unconscious, is followed by a rocket underneath the seat
02:43that propels it an additional hundred feet or so.
02:46Altogether, those two processes take only half a second, which can cause spinal compression so severe
02:52that it leaves pilots one to two inches shorter in height.
02:55A lot of guys have spinal cord injuries.
02:58It's a compression.
02:59I mean, literally, you go zero to, you know, 10 to 20 Gs instantaneously.
03:04If you've seen any, like, dogfighting videos of pulling Gs, I would fight the jet on the edge of consciousness,
03:10right?
03:10Pulling eight or nine Gs.
03:12That's hell.
03:14Now, double that.
03:15And it's just, it's extremely violent.
03:18The human body is not designed, first of all, to pull Gs, let alone to eject out of an aircraft.
03:24So, yeah, it's a very violent experience.
03:27And all of that's if everything has gone right.
03:29If a passenger isn't positioned nearly perfectly while ejecting, the injury sustained could be life-altering.
03:36The other thing that's pretty violent is you're going from sitting right here, no wind at all,
03:42to potentially three, four, 500 miles an hour of wind blast.
03:47So, you know, if you've been driving down the highway, you know, doing 80, 90, breaking the law,
03:52and you put your hand out the window, it almost gets ripped back, right?
03:56So, if you're not in a good body position when you eject, if your arm's hanging out a little bit,
04:01you might have what we call a flail injury.
04:03Your arms might just get ripped out of their sockets type of thing if you're not in a good body
04:08position.
04:08I have a close friend of mine who survived the fastest F-18 ejection.
04:14He was almost supersonic.
04:17It was like 695 miles per hour.
04:20And it would be quicker to tell you what didn't break as opposed to what broke.
04:24Just like everything broke.
04:26So, it's a very violent experience from the ejection itself to going into the wind blast
04:32to now having to land in enemy territory.
04:35I mean, there's almost an infinite number of things that can go wrong.
04:40I remember switching from wearing a metallic band to a leather band when I started flying fighters.
04:47Why?
04:47Because there was a guy flying a prowler who was out of position,
04:51and they pulled the ejection handle, and his metal watch band got caught on the canopy.
04:56And when he was hanging in his parachute, he went to inflate his raft.
05:00You pull on these two tabs, and only one side opened up.
05:04He's like, why isn't this other tab opening?
05:06And he looked down, and his hand had been sheathed off.
05:09And it's interesting because the military defines a successful ejection as
05:15pilot pulls the ejection handle, canopy fires, rocket fires, parachute opens.
05:22What didn't I name?
05:23You live.
05:24So, the definition of a successful ejection to the military is all that stuff worked.
05:29What happened to the pilot is in God's hand.
05:33So, there are so many things that can go wrong during this.
05:36Like I said, pulling the ejection handles, it's either that or death.
05:41And, you know, I'm going to choose the ejection handles and take my chances.
05:45And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
05:46And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
05:46And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
05:46And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
05:46And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
05:46And, I'm going to choose the ejection handles.
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