Chopper with Ejector Seat

Contrary to posts I have seen on ATS saying how American Technology is greatly advanced to that of Russian, I felt the need to show this...



This is the Ka-50 which was the first Helicopter to be fitted with an Ejcetor Seat..

Link

Why is this technology not so widely used among US and European Helicopters... would be interested if anyone could inform me if I am incorrect.

as the link says, you are quite correct!



I have read about projects to fit helicopters and aircraft with airbags similar to that found in many cars..

link

this is something that should have been implemented a long time ago.

This is nothing new. The US was doing experiments with helicopters in the 60's with ejection seats. When pulled to eject, the blades would blast off from the rotar and then the seat would eject. But, designers thought it too costly to introduce and decidely that the copter had a greater chance to land when injured than a plane traveling at mach numbers.

The helos have massive shock absorbers under the seats I think now. Correct me if im wrong here.

Train

I really do apologize to anyone who may be offended by this, but when I saw the title of this thread I thought someone was making a Polish joke.

Ya know, the Polish Military has helicopters with ejection seats as well as submarines with sliding screen doors?

LOL please don't be offended anyone, I have many Polish friends and the Polish people are just as intelligent as any other group.

I dont know much, about anything, I do know that it is not very attractive.
I hope it can fight, cuz its dang ugly.

[edit on 18-3-2005 by SpittinCobra]

Autorotation. Why do a VERY RISKY eject when its not a forgone conclusion that the impact will kill the pilot?

why dont they incorperate an escape hatch into the bottom? as long as there is foward momentum then the copter will by pass the pilot, otherwise its pilot pancakes.

I have always wondered why they don't design an ejection seat that ejects sideways instead of vertically? There must be some reasons why it wouldnt work

The main reason why ejection seats eject up is because many times there is not altitude for a downward ejection when something goes wrong. Many military aircraft have what is called a zero-zero ejection seat. A zero-zero seat enables a pilot or crewman to eject from an aircraft that is stationary on the ground. This can come in handy in the event of a fire on the ground. The problem with a sideways ejection is that there is no way to support the human body against the forces necessary for an ejection.
Helicopters are unique in the fact that they can make an emergency landing with very little foreward airspeed. A small Cessna still needs a couple of hundred feet to make an emergency landing. A helicopter only needs a small clearing in which to land. I spent a few years as a helicopter crewman in the US Navy and walked away from a few landings where they trucked away the helicopter to the junkyard. The seats are specially engineered to allow a person to walk away from a very hard landing. We has a catastrophic Main Gearbox failure about 150 feet off of a concrete pad. We hit HARD! My seat collapsed downward and I ended up with my knees against my chin, but other than a few streatched muscles I was fine.
In my opinion the only thing an upward firing ejection seat in a helicopter is good for is a large economy pepperoni slicer. If you need the seat that means that the aircraft has failed, what makes you think that the mechanism to eject the blades will work??

Actually it is just submarines with screen doors. You know! To keep those pesky water mosquitos out.

Blah , Blah , Blah gyes
You will never sayd that Russian is the best .

I read somewhere about a possible downward ejection seat for copters that someone was messing with as well... Both of these are in a way technological dead ends as helicopters posess the capability to auto rotate to a fairly controlled landing except in catastrophic failure type situations. In those same situations I would be extremelly disinclined to trust in the explosive bolts blowing the rotor.

They'd never give Russia any credit for being better, and they automatically call everything Russian ugly esspecially their choppers, the Apache isn't that great looking either y'know, it's just the way attack helicopters look...

I dont think that anyone here thinks everything russia has is crap, if everything russia has is crap that why would china be buying stuff from them, Russia can put good stuff on paper and make a half dozen of em but they dont produce enough to be of any effect, and russia sells planes to other countries and as far as i can remember russian planes didnt hold up to well against American Airforce During NK war, or The first Gulf war, Which the US Government says Russia helped train pilots in Iraq, and russia supplied alot of there Technology to Iraq which didnt fare to well.

it is easy to not agree with you. so maby hold the usa government ,and continue still about the aircraft? and not about so-whether it is necessary needed ejection system, if the wholl aircraft use them ..


[edit on 18-3-2005 by Fenix F 308]

Wow, I don't think this design is well-conceived. I can see a couple things going wrong:

1. Pilot ejects close to ground and six rotor blades fly off, skewering people/friendlies nearby.

2. Pilot ejects and even one of the six release mechanisms (explosive bolts?) fails to fire leaving one of the six blades attached. Pilot is chopped in half.

As skippy mentioned, don't 'copters have an inherent ability to soften their crashes by autorotation? Keeping the pilot's spine from crippling compression upon impact with the ground seems like a better way to preserve a country's pilots than to devise an upward ejection seat IMO. Heck, I'd prefer a giant parachute that ejects out the back and stops the whole craft than to take the risk of ejecting into the path of spinning rotors and praying that the engineers did their job.

I could invent a sideways ejection seat that had lateral support for the pilot if only these darn gummint contracts weren't so hard to get!



[edit on 18-3-2005 by smallpeeps]

I've heard about some of this. Sure it looks dangerous, but I find it's better than no ejection seat. Anyhow autorotation works, so long as the rotor blades are intact. But if the chopper is going down, theres a good chance the rotor blades are useless.

Anyhow you guys think the Ka-50 is ugly, check out the Havoc, now thats an ugly Russian chopper. However both are very combat effective. And in my opinion, the Havoc being the uglier one is the more combat effective one.

The B52 lower stations has Ejection Seats that fire downward. This of course was designed when the buff was primarily a high level bomber and cruised at 70k ft. Now that they fly at tree top level it is not a very atractive egress system. I don't know about today but when I was in USAF they trained the gus downstairs to egress out of one of the open hatches up top during bailout. We never timed how long it would take for someone fully suited with chute to clime up that latter. I think it's a forgone conclusion that if you ride down stairs, you're toast if anything happens.

I think the ejection seat for helicopters is not practical as the others have already said. Besides you need the ejections seat mostly during the combat and todays helicopters are designed to fly very low, so I think aoutorotate is enough.
So IMO the seat just adds useless weight. However I think the Kamov system of two counterrotating rotors is great especially for attack helicopter(only NOTAR is better IMHO, and it is not operational yet).. I think that K-50/52 would be doing much better in Iraq than Apaches, because they are much better armored. So not everythink Russian is crap ...