Lots of pilots owe their lives to the ejector seat -a genuinely great invention.
There are a couple of problems with their use, however. Pilots suffer a necessarily severe impact when being rocketed out of their aircraft and the planes themselves tend to become scrap seconds later.
Today’s invention tries to lower the losses when a plane has been damaged and can no longer fly stably. The fact is that almost all supersonic aircraft are designed to be unstable -this allows onboard computers to maximise manouevrability.
If a plane is damaged in flight a computer would instantly detect which part of the airframe had been lost or damaged and automatically jettison (or disable) the exactly corresponding part at the symmetrical location on the other side of the fuselage. This would balance the aerodynamic effects of the damage and give the pilot increased opportunity to land his or her aircraft -or at least buy time to undertake a less hasty ejection.
