Leitrim-born Ron McPartland, who died last month, had a unique distinction in being the first and still only man to make a certain kind of journey in an Irish aircraft. Or more exactly, out of an Irish aircraft. Because the immediate mode of transport for his small piece of aviation history was an ejector seat.
He was a young Air Corps cadet at the time, May 5th, 1961, and the trainee pilot in a Vampire jet flown by Commandant Jeremiah O’Connor. The lesson for the day in question was how to deal with an aircraft when it stalled and went into a spin. To which end, O’Connor took off from Baldonnel Airport that morning and headed north, reaching a height of 30,000ft somewhere over east Cavan.
There, he set out his stall (as it were) by reducing the speed and applying the right rudder to send the plane into, first, a series of slow, horizontal gyrations, then a steep downward spiral. When he initiated the standard recovery procedure of reversing the rudder, however, the aircraft did not respond.
The fraught moments that followed were described 50 years later by aviation historian Michael Traynor, in an anniversary article for the Leitrim Observer:
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“The descent was so rapid that the 3-pointer altimeter was unreadable, and at approximately 20,000 feet, Comdt O’Connor reached forward to the centre of the instrument panel and pulled the canopy release handle to unlock the canopy, which was jettisoned with a deafening roar as the full blast of the air was felt by both pilots. Without hesitation, the cadet pulled his face mask down to fire the Ejection Seat Mechanism and the ... seat, complete with cadet, departed the stricken aircraft with an enormous release of power.”
The cadet was now descending rapidly towards Cavan without having been trained in the use of a parachute and with little or no means of controlling its direction. He concentrated on avoiding a lake, then aimed for a bog where he saw a man working with a donkey and cart, and tried to attract his attention in case of a bad landing. The man looked up all right but, seeing what was coming, jumped into the cart and fled.
McPartland landed unhurt, somehow, and with folded parachute made his way across fields to a farmhouse where, as he would recall, “I knocked on the half-open door through which I could see two elderly men drinking tea. They looked at me in disbelief (I was still wearing my helmet) and one of them half rose and blessed himself. The other asked if I was a spaceman.”
After explaining that no, he was merely a member of the Air Corps who “had to leave my aeroplane in a hurry”, he asked if the men could drive him to the nearest Garda station. They at first declined. Then as he began walking to the village of Mullagh, the veteran Cavan men recovered sufficiently from their astonishment to ask if he would pay for the journey. He would, so they gave him a lift.
When other locals claimed to have seen the plane crash some distance away, McPartland feared for his commandant. In fact, only the canopy and ejector seat had hit the ground. Their jettisoning, meanwhile, had helped stabilise the aircraft, so that O’Connor did not have to eject and was able to fly back to Baldonnell safely.
McPartland’s pioneering journey into Cavan also marked a milestone in cross-Border co-operation. For the seat in which he left the plane was the invention of a Co Down man, James Martin from Crossgar, an aviation engineer who, as aircraft became ever faster during and after the second World War, devised a new, explosive procedure to propel pilots clear of the plane.
The happy denouement to the 1961 event included a dinner in London nine months later where Martin’s company celebrated saving of 500 lives to date, including McPartland’s. According to Traynor, the Down inventor made special mention of how a seat “designed by a man from the Wee North had saved ... a fellow Irishman from the Free State”.
Then again, there had also been a strong cross-Border element in the seat’s development, thanks to the intrepid Bernard Ignatius Lynch from Dunshaughlin, a fitter with Martin’s company. Big and burly, Lynch volunteered to test the seats, undergoing the first of many ejections in January 1945.
That was on the ground, but after a course in parachuting, he was soon doing it in the air, at 8,000ft and from a plane travelling 320mph. And so on for many tests, at various altitudes and speeds, until St Patrick’s Day 1954, when his luck ran out.
His 17th airborne ejection was from 30,000ft. Alas, writes Traynor, a problem forced Lynch to use his emergency parachute and he landed awkwardly, fracturing an ankle that would not mend well. His ejector days were over, although not before he had helped perfect the seats as standard equipment in RAF (and a few Irish Air Corps) jets.
