Faster aircraft meant the pilot risked striking the vertical tail fin, or the horizontal tailplane, as they bailed out. His gruesome experience threw into sharp relief the dangers pilots faced as jet engines made planes capable of speeds approaching 600mph (960km/h). Unable to open his parachute he plummeted to the ground, falling through the roof of the RAE.īut Davie did not die in vain. Astonishingly, he still managed to get out - only to be critically injured, or knocked unconscious, by the aircraft's tailplane as he tried to leap clear. As he tried to bail out, Davie's left arm was severed trying to open the canopy - possibly due to it snapping shut in the windblast. Davie, a test pilot with the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, UK, was flying the prototype of Gloster's twin-engined jet fighter, the Meteor, when one engine completely disintegrated on a high speed test run at 20,000 feet, leaving the aircraft hurtling out of control. Five months later, on 4 January 1944, the savage forces associated with emerging high-speed jet-powered flight would become more apparent still. Fortunately he was able to breathe by sucking on his severed oxygen tube and open his parachute - and he survived with only a touch of frostbite. But before Sqn Ldr Davie could attempt to bail out at 33,000 feet, the canopy glass shattered and the gyrating plane jettisoned him into a 20,000-foot freefall - stripping him of his boots, helmet and oxygen mask in the process. The controls had jammed on his Gloster E28, the testbed for Britain's spanking new jet engines, plunging the plane into a high-speed, spinning dive. When squadron leader Douglas Davie of the RAF bailed out of a crippled jet on 30 July 1943 he had no choice in the matter: the tremendous jet-assisted g forces simply hurled him out of the cockpit as his plane spun out of control.
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