Eventually, the most important question remained unanswered.
A steel mass could survive acceleration that a human being might not.
Someone had to sit in the seat.
Bernard Lynch became part of the experiment
Bernard Lynch was a Martin-Baker employee who agreed to become the human subject for the company's early ejection testing.
On January 24, 1945, Lynch took part in Martin-Baker's first live static ejection from its specially constructed tower.
The test did not involve an aircraft.
It did involve a real man sitting above an experimental cartridge system whose purpose was to fire him upward.
Lynch survived.
More tower work followed.
The tests allowed Martin to compare what the instruments recorded with what Lynch actually experienced.
That difference was valuable.
A machine could report acceleration.
Lynch could report whether it hurt.
A graph could show a peak.
Lynch could describe whether the force felt like a sudden blow or a smoother push.
Engineers could then alter the mechanism and test again.
Gradually, the early seat became more sophisticated.
One major development involved the ejection gun.
Rather than depend on one extremely sharp cartridge impulse, Martin developed a staged system intended to produce a more acceptable rise in acceleration.
The eventual airborne test seat used a two-cartridge ejection gun that gave the seat an ejection velocity of about 60 feet per second. Martin-Baker's technical history says this arrangement was intended to produce an acceptable rate of increase in g-force rather than an unnecessarily severe shock.
The tower tests were encouraging.
They still could not answer the most dangerous question.
What happened when the seat entered a real high-speed slipstream?
The first seconds outside the cockpit created another danger
A static tower can reproduce launch acceleration.
It cannot reproduce a jet fighter moving at more than 300 miles per hour.
Inside an aircraft, the cockpit protects the pilot from most of the relative wind.
During ejection, that protection disappears almost instantly.
The seat rises only a short distance before the pilot's head and upper body enter the airflow.
Then the entire seat follows.
The aerodynamic conditions change in a fraction of a second.
The pilot may experience a violent blast against his face and chest.
His limbs may be forced into positions he did not choose.
The seat itself may begin to rotate.
This last problem was especially serious.
An aircraft is carefully shaped to remain stable in flight.
An ejection seat is not.
It is a compact structure carrying a human body, harnesses, parachute equipment, and other irregular shapes.
Once that object enters a fast airflow, there is no reason it should naturally remain upright.
If it began tumbling rapidly, several things could go wrong.
Lynch could become disoriented.
His neck could be injured.
The later parachute sequence could become tangled.
He might be unable to release himself from the seat.
Martin-Baker therefore needed a way to stabilize the seat after aircraft clearance.
The answer involved another parachute, but not the main parachute that would carry Lynch to the ground.
The engineers used a smaller device known as a drogue.
The drogue had one simple job before the main parachute
A drogue parachute creates drag without immediately trying to support the full weight of the descending person.
Its job in the early Martin-Baker sequence was to help control the seat.
Martin-Baker's technical description of Lynch's first airborne seat shows how carefully the stages were arranged.
After the seat had risen approximately 24 feet, a static line operated the drogue gun.