If you think that the military routinely hides problems from the public, then you must never have read the reports that congressional committees produce as part of their annual review of Pentagon budget requests. Those reports describe hundreds of problems that need to be addressed each year, and often result in legislative language directing remedies. Here's an example from page 324 of the House Armed Services Committee's report on the fiscal 2015 National Defense Authorization Act. It's the kind of force-protection issue that might never see the light of day were it not for the tireless work of committee staffers and the legislators who hired them.
Most of the fighters and bombers in the joint fleet are equipped with ejection seats that allow pilots to quickly escape when their aircraft face imminent destruction. The ejection seats are catapulted and/or rocketed out of cockpits after the canopy is blown away, and then a parachute opens once the seat has been stabilized. This only takes a few seconds -- which sometimes is all the time an endangered pilot has, since ejections have been known to occur within a few hundred feet of the ground. It's a dangerous, last-ditch course of action, but the alternative is certain death when the plane hits the ground at high speed. Hundreds of such ejections have been successfully accomplished over the years.
The Air Force has relied for many years on the Advanced Concept Ejection Seat II (ACES II) to save its pilots. The seat was originally developed by McDonnell Douglas, and today with many refinements is produced by United Technologies Aerospace Systems. It's an impressive piece of equipment, designed to automatically adjust its performance to the airspeed of the plane and the weight of the occupant. Thus, a female fighter pilot weighing half of what a male pilot does will still eject at the same speed, optimized for the plane's velocity and altitude. The system has an exemplary safety record -- only 1% of pilots using it have suffered back injuries, compared with up to 40% of those using other makes.
(Disclosure: United Technologies contributes to my think tank.)
But the Armed Services Committee says there's a problem with the Air Force's ejection seats, and with those used by the other services. They were designed and installed before pilots started using sophisticated headgear like night-vision goggles and helmet-mounted displays. Wearing such devices when ejecting at high speed increases the likelihood of severe injury or death. To quote the committee's report, "Data indicates that the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System and helmet mounted displays in tactical fighter aircraft can structurally fail above 450 knots, which causes wind-stream aerodynamics on the pilot's helmet to generate neck tension loads over 700 pounds."
The helmet-mounted display used on the new F-35 fighter is designed to withstand very high wind... [+]
The report cites the case of a promising young officer who was killed while ejecting from an F-16 fighter off the coast of Italy at night last year. Air Force Times reported that he died from "severe head and neck trauma" which may have been due to the fact he was wearing both night-vision goggles and a helmet-mounted cueing system at the time of ejection. Although these devices greatly enhance situational awareness and safety under normal flying conditions, they can become killers in an emergency escape using current ejection seats. The committee report suggests that this violates Air Force regulations requiring that the performance of ejection seats reduce the risk of major injury to below 5%.
Pursuant to its findings of an emerging safety issue, the committee directed the Department of Defense Inspector General to report back next year on which ejection seats currently in use by the joint force comply with aircrew survivability and airworthiness requirements. It also established two line items in the budget to implement an “Ejection Seat Reliability Improvement Program,” funded in fiscal 2015 at $10.5 million. Authorization and appropriation of this money will depend on the action of other defense committees in both chambers, but Congress in the past has been highly sympathetic to funding of force-protection initiatives, and the ejection-seat issue would certainly seem to fall into that category.
United Technologies Aerospace Systems, the last remaining manufacturer of ejection-seat systems in the U.S., has developed a fix for ACES II deficiencies in protecting pilots with extensive headgear. In essence, the fix -- called ACES 5 -- increases passive protection of a user's neck and head, prevents arms and legs from flailing, and upgrades parachute performance to stabilize the ejection seat more quickly and slow the rate of descent (the ACES II design uses a small parachute called a drogue for quick stabilization and then a much larger chute to carry the ejected pilot to the ground). The whole system can be installed in one day, and is easier to maintain than legacy ejection seats due to its modular design and longer service life.
Installation of an upgraded ejection seat on Air Force aircraft would undoubtedly feed into the broader issue of what escape system should be used on future U.S. tactical aircraft. Martin Baker of the United Kingdom, the only other ejection-seat producer of any consequence, is equipping the F-35 fighter that will eventually replace most of the tactical aircraft in the joint force. But it will be a long, long time before legacy combat aircraft like the F-16 fighter and B-1 bomber exit the force, and virtually all of their pilots will be wearing headgear during the intervening decades that could contribute to the problem the Armed Services Committee has identified. Thanks to the committee's work, it looks like this emerging danger to pilots may finally be fixed after years of inaction.
