Getting out of a helicopter in an emergency is always going to be even more difficult because of those overhead rotor blades.
Today’s invention is an ejector seat for rotary wing aircraft. The sequence of its operation would be:
1. jettison the tail rotor
2. when the fuselage begins to spin, release the aircrew seat restraints and allow them to be flung radially out of the front of the aircraft
3. having cleared the main rotor radius, each seat would deploy a small gyrocopter rotor (parachutes are nearly useless at low altitude)
4. on sensing the proximity of the earth, seat-mounted retro rockets would fire
5. on impact, the underside of the seat would act as an additional crush zone (as in the nose-cones of F1 cars, which allow survival of head-on crashes at close to the terminal velocity for a seat free-falling through air).
