On July 24, 1946, Bernard Lynch pulled the firing handle in the rear cockpit of a Gloster Meteor traveling at about 320 miles per hour at an altitude of roughly 8,000 feet.
The seat beneath him fired upward.
Within a fraction of a second, Lynch was no longer inside the jet. The experimental seat shot above the cockpit, carrying him into an airflow strong enough to injure an exposed human body. A small stabilizing parachute deployed behind the seat. The seat stopped tumbling, slowed, and entered the next stage of the escape sequence. Lynch then released his harness, pushed himself away from the seat, opened his personal parachute, and descended toward the ground.
He landed safely.
Martin-Baker later described the landing as perfect. More important, every major part of the experimental system had worked together. The firing mechanism had generated enough force to clear the aircraft. Lynch's body had survived the acceleration. The face screen had protected him from the blast of air. The drogue had stabilized the seat. Lynch had remained conscious and physically capable of separating himself and opening his parachute.
For British engineers, that successful landing answered a question that could not be settled on a drawing board or test tower.
A human being could be mechanically launched out of a high-speed jet and survive.
That result would eventually help change the relationship between pilots and military aircraft. Faster airplanes would no longer have to depend completely on a pilot being strong enough, lucky enough, and high enough to climb out of a failing cockpit.
The aircraft could throw him clear.
That idea sounds familiar today because the ejection seat has become one of the defining safety systems of military aviation. In the 1940s, however, it was still a frightening engineering problem. The aircraft that created the need for the system were advancing faster than the science of escaping them.
Bernard Lynch volunteered to enter the point where those two technologies finally met.
The old way of leaving an aircraft was becoming dangerous
In the early decades of powered flight, an emergency escape from an aircraft depended almost completely on the pilot.
If the aircraft was still high enough and stable enough, he might release his harness, open the cockpit, climb out, push himself away, and deploy his parachute.
The process was never easy.
It became increasingly dangerous as aircraft performance improved.
During World War II, fighter speeds rose rapidly. Aircraft became more streamlined. Cockpits became more tightly enclosed. Engines produced greater power, and pilots entered combat at speeds that earlier aviators would have considered extraordinary.
Those improvements were valuable while the aircraft was functioning.
They became obstacles when the pilot needed to leave.
At high speed, the air outside a cockpit is not simply a strong breeze. The force grows dramatically with speed. A pilot attempting to rise into that airflow could find that his own muscles were not enough to control his body.
His head could be forced backward.
His arms could be thrown behind him.
His legs could strike the cockpit.
Equipment attached to his body could become dangerous.
Even opening or removing the canopy might be difficult.
Then came another problem.
The pilot still had to avoid the aircraft itself.
A fighter's tail traveled along the same path only a moment after the pilot left the cockpit. If the pilot did not get far enough away quickly enough, he could collide with the horizontal stabilizer, vertical tail, or another part of the airframe.
A successful exit from the cockpit therefore did not guarantee survival.
The pilot might survive an engine failure and die during the bailout.
He might escape a burning cockpit and then strike the tail.
He might leave the aircraft successfully but be knocked unconscious before he could open his parachute.
By the final years of World War II, these were no longer unusual theoretical concerns. Aircraft speed was becoming one of the greatest enemies of conventional escape.
The arrival of jet fighters made the trend unmistakable.
Britain's Gloster Meteor entered service during the war. Germany fielded the Messerschmitt Me 262. Experimental aircraft in several countries were already showing that military aviation was moving toward a world in which speeds would continue rising.
The faster the fighter became, the less reasonable it was to assume that a pilot could simply climb out.
Engineers needed to remove human strength from the first stage of the escape.
The solution required a machine powerful enough to move the pilot before the airflow could defeat him.
Other countries had already recognized the same problem
The history of ejection seats did not begin with Bernard Lynch.
German engineers had already developed assisted escape systems during World War II. On January 13, 1942, German test pilot Helmut Schenk escaped from a Heinkel He 280 after the aircraft developed a serious icing problem. He became the first person known to survive an emergency ejection from an aircraft. Germany later installed ejection seats in operational aircraft including the Heinkel He 219.
That earlier German work is important because it corrects a common exaggeration about Lynch.
He was not the first human being in history ever to leave an aircraft using an ejection seat.
His role was different.
Lynch became the human test subject who proved the British Martin-Baker system during an airborne test at high speed.
That distinction matters because one successful ejection-seat design does not automatically validate another.
Different systems used different mechanisms.
Their acceleration profiles were different.
Their seats were different.
Their restraints were different.
Their stabilization methods were different.
The way they cleared the cockpit could be different.
A British engineer could study the fact that German pilots had survived ejection and still face a long list of unanswered questions about his own system.