Percentage of pilots saved by bailing out of aircraft

Barrett said:

Late to this thread but thought I'd share:
One of the contributors to my 15th AF history said "The army spent 9 months teaching me to fly an airplane but not one minute on how to bail out of one."

Click to expand...

Nine months sounds like he had a pretty decent level of training

To show the difference between Soviet and US/UK thinking, I am reminded of a good friend who went to China and bought a MiG-15 UTI of Soviet manufacture. He was talking with veterans who told him about 1950s Soviet pilot training.

They had a MiG-15 UTI with the rear canopy removed and a reusable ejection seat. They'd fly it into a base, assemble the pilots, put them one at a time into the back seat, and have the pilot go fly it down the runway. In the middle of the field, the pilot would eject the passenger! So, at the time (mid-late 1950s), almost every Soviet fighter pilot had experienced an ejection. It's a LOT easier to eject of you already have successful experience at it.

I'm trying without success to imagine that scenario in US / UK service.

I do NOT have any data on failures or injuries, but they were not ejecting at high speeds.

When I was in the Air Force and going to tech school at Lowry AFB, in Denver, Colorado, 1966, there was a fixture outside with a ejection seat fitted.
Cadets from the Air Force academy would come up in groups and get strapped into the seat and shot up the fixture about 50 feet, then slowly lowered back to the bottom.
I don't know what they powered the seat with, compressed air, or a charge.
This was just to get them familiar with the forces of ejection.
Sometimes someone would not be positioned just right and get injured, and they'd leave on a stretcher.
Watching this was a popular pastime, I was there almost a year, and witnessed these ejection familiarizations twice.
Both times at least one Cadet was injured.