Tampa Bay Deal of the Day: B-57 Canberra bomber ejection seat!

Maybe you’ve got a corner in your house for U.S. Air Force memorabilia, or maybe you’re restoring a B-57 Canberra bomber — but either way, if you’re looking for an ejection seat, there’s a seller in St. Pete looking to sell a B-57 Canberra ejector seat for $2,000 (but they also seem open to offers).

I was a big fan of airplanes and aerospace stuff as a kid, so I’m familiar with the B-57, which was made by the Glen L. Martin company, which later got merged in the 1960s into Martin Marietta, and then again in the 1990s into Lockheed Martin.

While the B-57 has long since been retired from the Air Force, NASA still have a couple of specialized versions, the WB-57, which they use for high-altitude research.

On the very off chance that you’re thinking of buying this seat because you think it might be cooler than using an elevator or stairs…

• I’m pretty sure this seat doesn’t come with the rocket engine that actually does the work of ejecting you out of the plane.
• You need to be aware of this equation:

This basic physics equation shows how much force is required for an ejection seat to do its thing:

• F is for force, the value you want to know.
• m is for mass, which for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll say is the same thing as weight (cue the sound of my friend, physics professor Tom Simko, screaming “NOOOOOO!”). You have to account for the mass of whoever’s in the seat and the mass of the seat including the rocket engine and fuel.
• a is for acceleration, which is physics-ese for rate of change of speed. Earth gravity, on average, accelerates you towards the center of the planet at a rate of 9.81 meters per second or per second, or to put in terms my American friends will appreciate, that’s about one and a half Ford F-150 lengths per second per second. To eject you, the seat has to accelerate you in the opposite direction of gravity, and at an acceleration greater than gravity — typically 14 to 20 times.

Pilots who have ejected from a plane report that they lost a little height from having their spines compressed from the force. If you had a big meal before ejecting, having your body and the digested food within suddenly weigh 14 to 20 times as much will probably cause you to crap your pants.

So yeah, this seat is best used as memorabilia rather than a cool thing you can demonstrate at your pool parties (“Hey, everybody, who wants to see me land on the roof?”)