A2C wrote:
What about Remove before flight safety pin's? I would think an owner of such an aircraft would take lots of pride in it, and learn about when to remove the pins and when to keep them in.
I would venture to say that possibly the accidents occured due to ignorance by unfamiliar maintenence people "slipping" a pin out and firing the seat. Heard about it alot in the Navy, when plane captains were messing with the plane and fire the seat. Many occurances.
The key phrase in your statement is "unfamiliar maintenance people". Like I said in my first post, "make sure that you have all the proper manuals", I guess that would assume that one would actually open and read said manuals.
Even if you're not going to perform maintenance on an ejection seat, if you're going to be working on an aircraft equipped with one you should learn the proper safety precautions and measures associated with the seat. In the AF we trained anyone who might possibly have a reason to be near the seats - crew chiefs, avionics, weapons, etc on what to look for to ensure that the seat was properly safed. I have chewed out more than one pilot because he didn't do his part in disarming the seat before he got out of the cockpit. We were taught on F-16's that before you sat on the canopy rail and leaned into the cockpit to check that the 3 seat pins were installed. Crew chiefs did basic visual inspections of the seat when installed in the plane, and the egress shop did the more detailed maintenance on the seats in the backshop as well as removal and installation of the seats in the plane.
262crew- I'm not sure what type aircraft you're working on that has one (ME 262 I'm guessing?), but it is critical that you learn the do's and don'ts of ejection seats. Like I said, I've only worked on B-52's and F-16's, I'm sure there are some people on here that are more familiar with the older seats installed on the jet warbirds that can give you some good advice. PM me if there's anything else I can do for you.