![]() ![]() The He 280 was never put into production status. At 7,875 ft (2,400 m), Schenk found he had no control, jettisoned his towline, and ejected. It had its usual Heinkel HeS 8A turbojets removed, and was towed aloft from the Erprobungsstelle Rechlin central test facility of the Luftwaffe in Germany by a pair of Messerschmitt Bf 110C tugs in a heavy snow-shower. The fighter had been being used in tests of the Argus As 014 impulse jets for Fieseler Fi 103 missile development. One of the He 280 test pilots, Helmut Schenk, became the first person to escape from a stricken aircraft with an ejection seat on 13 January 1942 after his control surfaces iced up and became inoperative. Early models were powered by compressed air and the first aircraft to be fitted with such a system was the Heinkel He 280 prototype jet-engined fighter in 1940. The first ejection seats were developed independently during World War II by Heinkel and SAAB. Prior to this, the only means of escape from an incapacitated aircraft was to jump clear ("bail out"), and in many cases this was difficult due to injury, the difficulty of egress from a confined space, g forces, the airflow past the aircraft, and other factors. ![]() The design was perfected during World War II. Dragomir patented his "catapult-able cockpit" at the French Patent Office. It was successfully tested on 25 August 1929 at the Paris-Orly Airport near Paris and in October 1929 at Băneasa, near Bucharest. The design featured a parachuted cell (a dischargeable chair from an aircraft or other vehicle). The modern layout for an ejection seat was first introduced by Romanian inventor Anastase Dragomir in the late 1920s. In 1916, Everard Calthrop, an early inventor of parachutes, patented an ejector seat using compressed air. United States Air Force F-15 Eagle ejection seat test using a mannequin.Ī bungee-assisted escape from an aircraft took place in 1910.
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