coming up in a time before ejection seats when the skilled and deadly pilots of world war ii exchanged fire and took damage to their aircraft sometimes they only had one option to bail out of their doomed plane and parachute back to safety in this video we will try to answer the question if you were a pilot in this intense situation how hard was it to actually bail out of a plane after being shot down in the greatest era of dog fighting before we get started i would like to thank world of warships for sponsoring this video make sure to stick around until the end of the video to learn more about this awesome free to play pc game and how to support tjNUMBER_TOKEN history enjoy in today's air combat when a plane takes a hit from enemy fire the endangered pilot can simply pull on the ejection lever and immediately be propelled from the cockpit into the safety of his automatically deployed parachute in the second world war however bailing out of a doomed aircraft was not exactly an easy task there were thousands of pilots from all sides of the war that had to leap from their planes and many pilots actually had to do it on more than one occasion the first record of a pilot bailing out of a damaged combat aircraft was in the last few weeks of world war one in the great war when air combat first came to be pilots did not wear parachutes if their plane was severely damaged or even worse if it caught on fire pilots had a few options to choose from as their next course of action but unfortunately none of these options ended with their survival parachutes did exist but were only used by men in observation balloons if their gas bags were lit aflame at the end of the war however a handful of german pilots were actually given parachutes and they were deployed on a few occasions including one particular situation that saved the life of german ace ernst dudette in comparison even though they had parachutes to give the american high command actually opted not to allow their pilots to wear parachutes because they believe they would make them much more likely to jump out of the plane at the first sight of danger thus costing them too many aircraft twenty years later however they would be a necessity for the fighter pilot and used throughout the world but before it could be deployed the pilot first had to safely bail out so let's take a look at the difficulty that these pilots in world war ii faced when forced to do this now one of my favorite things to do in videos like this is to take a look at the vintage training videos of the time
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN fighting before we get started i would like to thank world of warships for sponsoring this video make sure to stick around until the end of the video to learn more about this awesome free to play pc game and how to support tjNUMBER_TOKEN history END_SPONSOR_TOKEN