CNN: [2] A surprise company outing to an air base caused a 64-year-old French man so much stress that he flung himself from a fighter jet in midair, grabbing the ejector button in a panic and tumbling through the skies above France before landing in a field.
[3] The man had been surprised by employees at his firm, who had organized a joyride in a Dassault Rafale B jet for him as a treat. [4] But they apparently didn’t know their colleague as well as they thought. Once the man arrived at the Saint-Dizier air base in northeastern France in March 2019 and realized what his co-workers had arranged, he began to feel extremely stressed, according to a fairly remarkable aviation accident report by a French government agency.
[5] The unnamed man had never expressed any desire to fly in a fighter jet and had no previous military aviation experience, investigators discovered. [6] And thanks to a watch he was wearing which could measure his heart rate, investigators noticed that “his heart was in full tachycardia” before the flight, with a recorded heart rate ranging from 136 to 142 beats per minute.
But the man went through with the ride, joining a three-plane training exercise as a passenger. The Rafale B is used by the French air force, and has a maximum speed of nearly 1,400 kilometers per hour (870 miles per hour).