On 9/23/2010 5:00 AM, Jeff Findley wrote:

Plus, if the pilot got into real trouble, ejecting from a tail sitter
was more challenging than ejecting from a Harrier, again due to the
orientation of the pilot's seat during the tail sitting landing. Even
with its early teething problems, the Harriers were safer for the pilots
than tail sitters would have been. Thankfully, the tail sitters were
abandoned well before the stage where "teething problems" would likely
have killed several pilots.

You know, I'd never thought about that in relation to the Coleoptere,
but the pilot did eject from it when it was in the vertical flight mode;
they must have had a system that swung the seat back to horizontal
flight position before firing.

Pat