[SoftTalker]

Ejecting for for no reason would end the pilot's flying career. Ejecting for any reason will result in an investigation, at minimum. Pilots are expected to fly the airplane until the last extremity.

So while yes it's possible, it's unlikely, and the return on investment of making the plane able to do something like "return to base" in that circumstance would be a large negative number.

[throwup238]

Even ejecting with good reason is enough to end a fighter pilot’s career. The rates for significant back injury are between 1 in 3 and 1 in 2 depending on the design.

[mikkupikku]

My understanding is they're automatically retired from flight after the second (or maybe third?) ejection, not automatically after the first.

[appreciatorBus]

It feels like a good chunk of the comments here imply that ejection is a pretty common activity, hence the interest in what happens next, both to the pilot and the jet. I don’t have any ready statistics, but if ejection was a commonplace activity then the world‘s air forces would be depleted of planes in very short order. It wouldn’t shock me if there’s a policy about pilots who ejected more than x times, but I would be shocked if the policy was ever actually enforced, simply due to the rarity of it even being an issue.

[throwup238]

The Martin Baker homepage shows 7802 lives saved using just their brand of ejection seat so it's not exceedingly rare.

I'd estimate less than 5% of fighter jet pilots eject during their career.

[edgineer]

One F-35 costs around $100 million. I count two that perhaps theoretically, with a clever autopilot, could have landed on their own after pilot ejection. At the scale of $200 million I'm not certain that the additional engineering of the already-clever jet would really have cost more than that.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2024/10/pilot-error-blame...

https://simpleflying.com/f35-pilot-troubleshooting-lockheed-...

[WheatMillington]

Do you realise we're dealing with humans? Humans who make decisions based on a multitude of factors, or sometimes none at all?

[SoftTalker]

Yes, but flying aircraft with ejection seats is demanding work and few humans are capable or qualified to do it. Most people can barely manage to drive cars safely.