I ejected from the cockpit of a plane not once but twice as an RAF pilot at Lancashire's BAE Warton

It’s a choice former BAE Typhoon Air Crew Advisor Craig Penrice faced twice in his time as a pilot.

The first plane he ejected from in 1985 was a English Electric Lighting F Mk 6. XS 921 - that was 40 years ago and along with other ejectee pilots, Craig will be commemorating to mark the milestone in St Annes.

It’s a remarkable story...

With fuel running desperately low towards the end of his sortie, Flight Lieutenant Craig Penrice requested permission to return to base. But as he gave the aircraft a turn to the left, things started to go wrong.

Almost as though the stick was taking on a life of its own, the movement sent the English Electric Lightning plummeting into a sickening high-speed spiral dive. Within seconds Flt. Lt. Penrice was plunging straight down towards the freezing North Sea.

Knowing his only choice was to get out before the jet hit the sea, his training instinctively kicked in. Craig reached for the ejector handle. Boom. The next thing he remembers was lying on the cold floor of a helicopter on his way to hospital.

Craig confesses he always wanted to fly.

“My parents’ house was slap bang under the approach to Glasgow airport, so we’d watch airliners coming in and out. It was the late 60s and early 70s, when things like Jumbos were just starting to come about.”

At university he joined the air squadron and caught the flying bug. “I knew I wanted to be an RAF pilot,” he says. “I joined straight after graduating and served for 20 years.”

Trained on the English Electric Lightning, Flt. Lt. Penrice had been flying the aircraft for around two and a half years and had logged 700 hours’ flying time when he was forced to eject off the East Yorkshire coast in 1985.

“XS 921 was actually my commander’s plane,” says Craig. “It had only just come out of the hangar after a lovely new paint job on the Monday, and by the Thursday I’d had to ditch it into the sea.”

“There’s about and hour and 15 minutes after the ejection that I have no memory of. I had a badly broken arm and leg, but the life threatening thing was hypothermia. The medics told me your body shuts down when it faces that kind of threat, so that’s probably why I can’t remember it.”

With 12 bits of metal in his arm and ten in his knee, it took Craig 11 months to get back into the cockpit. “I was told ‘you’ll never fly again, you’ll be lucky to walk again’, so I wanted to prove the medics wrong. When you’re 26, you don’t believe those things, you think ‘that’s my job, I’m going to do that again’.”

The damage to the nerves controlling the muscles in his arm meant Craig now had to use a metal splint in the cockpit. “I had to prove to the doctors and senior flying instructors that I could operate all the switches in the cockpit and, more importantly, if I had to eject again and my good arm was damaged I could survive with the bad arm.”

Pulled through by determination and the support of friends, family and his squadron Craig returned to flying the Electric Lightning until it went out of service in 1987, before moving on to the Hawk. After a spell as a test pilot with the US Navy, Craig moved on to work on the development of the Typhoon with BAE Systems becoming the first RAF pilot to fly the aircraft in 1994.

The injuries he sustained in his ejection from the Electric Lightning meant Craig had to be doubly prepared if he ever had to eject again. So when the engine and electrics failed on the Hunter Mk 6 he was flying to back to Exeter after an airshow in 2003, he was ready.

“My first thought was ‘this has not got to crash into anybody’s house’,” recalls Craig. “I knew I didn’t have time to get to an airfield, so I had to get to Cardigan Bay and jump out over an estuary off the coast.

“I’d always said, if it ever happens to me again, I hope it’s like the first one because I’d hate to have a lot of lead up time to ejecting. As it turned out, I was gliding for 17 minutes, knowing what was coming at the end of it.”

If anything, Craig was too well prepared this time: he’d tightened his lap strap so much the metal clip jammed, so when he ejected he was still attached to the 300lb ejector seat.

“My back was already broken from the force of the ejection, and although I managed to manually release myself from the ejector seat, I was falling so fast that I hit the sandbank pretty hard.”

Craig was paralysed for a week after the accident and says his back now contains so much metal “they’ll probably melt me down for scrap when I go!”

He admits recovering from this second ejection has been a much longer process.

“I came back to work after six months, but having been the chief project pilot for Typhoon, I found it very hard watching someone else flying ‘my’ plane. Not only had I lost my job, I had some serious medical issues to deal with and I needed counselling to get over that black period.

“Realising that you can’t cope and that it doesn’t hurt to talk to someone is the biggest revelation of my life,” he admits.

After spending time working in the US, Craig returned to Warton to take on the role of Aircrew Advisor with the Typhoon sales team

With his career at BAE Systems drawing to a close, Craig was stunned to learn that a replica of the first plane he ejected from would take pride of place as the new Gate Guardian at Samlesbury.

That was in 2003 and at the time he told the Lancashire Post: “It’s strange to think the last time I saw XS 921I was ejecting out of it. I’d love to be able to say I saw it spiralling away from me, but I’ve got no memory of it.

“Taking a look at the replica today, the finish on it, some of the panels and wrinkles you think…it’s really well done. It’s got a great amount of detail and it’s really evocative for me.

“The English Electric Lightning has a special place in Samlesbury’s history – and in mine. It’s fantastic that we’re recognising MAI’s engineering and manufacturing heritage, and I’m really pleased that it’s that plane.

“I can point it out to people and say ‘that’s the ghost of my aeroplane.”

Craig will meet with 11 other ejectees at the event as well as members of the squadron at the time.

They include the Commanding Officer, Wing Commander Simon “Sticky” Bostock and his wingman that day Flight Lieutenant Andy Wyatt.

He should have been flying the aircraft but they swapped to allow him to fly the jet that bore his name on the side. Andy later became a member of the Red Arrows.