Even ejecting with good reason is enough to end a fighter pilot’s career. The rates for significant back injury are between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2 depending on the design.
Even ejecting with good reason is enough to end a fighter pilot’s career. The rates for significant back injury are between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2 depending on the design.
My understanding is they're automatically retired from flight after the second (or maybe third?) ejection, not automatically after the first.
It feels like a good chunk of the comments here imply that ejection is a pretty common activity, hence the interest in what happens next, both to the pilot and the jet. I don’t have any ready statistics, but if ejection was a commonplace activity then the world‘s air forces would be depleted of planes in very short order. It wouldn’t shock me if there’s a policy about pilots who ejected more than x times, but I would be shocked if the policy was ever actually enforced, simply due to the rarity of it even being an issue.
The Martin Baker homepage shows 7802 lives saved using just their brand of ejection seat so it's not exceedingly rare.
I'd estimate less than 5% of fighter jet pilots eject during their career.