One thing I forgot to mention is that the ejection in the video could have been accidental. Fire may have set off the rockets, or possibly a piece of wreckage could have activated one seat. Typically in multi-crew aircraft, command activation (one pull of the handle shoots everyone) and self activation (each man for himself) are options, so if the pilot's seat went off, the other might follow automatically.

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I'm dense today. An addition to my addition. Some seats are designed to fire a few few underwater, and in some cases this has actually happened, saving the crew. The seat goes right through the canopy. In fact, some aircraft are designed for ejections through the canopy.

In the recently retired S-3 Vikings, for instance (my aircraft), the four-person crew would eject through the canopy. The seats were equiped with "breaker bars" that stuck up about 10 inches above the rest of the seat in order to break the canopy before anyone's head did. The canopies also had explosive detonation cords for quick removal, but that was a manual process and not really intended for ejections.

More trivia. Seat cushions on ejection seats are very thin, maybe a half inch or so. The reason for this is that the acceleration is so great that if they gave you much more padding, the seat would have reached too high a speed before fully compressing the foam, and the occupant would be at risk of a broken pelvis, etc. from the impact. So by using a thin cushion, the butt accelerate with the seat, preventing the seat from accelerating into the butt.

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funny, I picture you ejection from the dinner table in the middle of a sentence about book keeping rules for corporations

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The airplane held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My parachute and flight stick too,
For his civility.

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Most ejection seats are designed for zero/zero (zero altitude, zero speed) conditions. I mean... if you're strapped in and need to get out of a burning airplane, there really isn't time to do anything BUT eject.

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There is one I couldn't find of a jet hitting the ground almost vertical and the pilot ejecting safely, even as the plane goes nose first into the dirt. If anyone can find that one....

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That part of the movie was suggested by the Navy after the filmmakers said they wanted Goose to die in an air-to-air collision. The Navy said NO WAY are you gonna show our guys involved in an air-to-air. They were asked to come up with a scenario in which Goose could get killed. Based upon an actual training accident in the early days of the Tomcat, they came up with this scenario.

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