While the aircraft seats have individual levers to initiate ejection, the pilot has a switch to select either single or dual ejection. On the day of the flight the switch had been set to dual ejection. Yet only the rear seat ejected, preventing what would have been a major accident.
This seems weird, maybe an inexperienced reporter not understanding what he read in the report, or not expressing himself well (or an inept copyeditor screwing it up).
But read it again, it's talking about the pilot's selector switch, not the GIB's.
Fair enough, I was a bit sloppy in my earlier comment:
the GIB ejects solo and the pilot chooses to eject or not
To be more precise, as I recall, the GIB's selector is eject only the GIB (the checklist default) or eject both (in case the pilot is incapacitated). The pilot's selector is eject both (the checklist default? I'm not sure), or only the GIB.
In case of dual ejection, the GIB's seat goes out first, followed a fraction of a second later by the pilot's (to prevent the blast from the pilot's seat frying the GIB).
Perhaps the French do it differently, but this sounds like a monumental screwup in which for some unfathomable reason the GIB's selector was set in dual ejection mode and this wasn't checked and confirmed reset to single mode before takeoff (with a civilian ride-along
) and then the system (fortunately) also failed?
Inconcevable! -- unless that word doesn't mean what I think that word means.
OK, I can buy the photo given new info that it was a three-aircraft simultaneous takeoff (with plane cameras rolling) and the ejection came within seconds.
No ex-fighter jocks on PugSki to give a genuinely informed comment?