April 1, 2015

World’s First Helicopter Ejection Seat

By architfly International News 0 Comments

World’s First Helicopter Ejection Seat :

Ejection technology is quite old and is into existence since 1980s,however it was limited to aircraft only. During Heli Expo, Rotor Floater’s CEO, Sean Maday, explained the possibility of H.E.S (Helicopter Ejection System) as ejection system works well with aircraft at high altitude but its very difficult to eject at low altitude.

The most challenging part of a vertical ejection from a helicopter is getting the ejection seat through the rotors without hitting them.

“This is a problem that the aviation industry just hasn’t been able to solve.” said Maday. “We knew that timing an ejection seat through a full speed rotor blade wasn’t practical, so we came up with a way to slow the rotor down.”

In HES, they developed a specialized gear box that slows the helicopter’s rotor blade to allow the ejection seat to safely pass through. And to ensure minimum exposure to the blades, the specially designed ejection seat achieves a maximum velocity of Mach 19 – fast enough to pass through the blades in 0.002 seconds. “That speed is a little hard on the pilots, but helicopter pilots are a tough bunch, so we figure they can handle it.”

Rotor Floater’s technology is getting safer with each test. We wanted to know what kind of success rate Rotor Floater was having with the new seat, so we asked.

“In our recent tests, we achieved a 72% successful ejection rate using crash dummies” said Maday. “The gear box timing is proving to be quite tricky, but if I was a weatherman or baseball player, a 72% success rate would be phenomenal, so I’m feeling pretty good.”

Maday says that once they reach an 80% success rate, they’ll be looking for volunteer pilots to try out the system. “I’m a little surprised that we’ve had such a hard time recruiting people to try this ground-breaking technology” said Maday. “I’d volunteer myself, but I need to run the slow-motion cameras.”

Maday said his business partner was the first and only person to try the ejection system so far, but “his eagerness and optimism led to an unfortunate accident.” “But I wouldn’t worry too much about that, our success rate has improved over 13% since his ejection attempt.”