If you are riding in a fighter jet, leave things alone.

It probably is best not to fiddle with switches or controls when riding in the back seat of an air force plane.

A man who failed to obey that principle found himself hurtling out of the cockpit, smashing through the Perspex canopy and into space after grabbing the black- and yellow-striped handle between his legs. He had inadvertently pulled the eject lever and found himself blasted 100 metres into the sky on his rocket-powered seat.

 

From the title I thought this was about the base model seat adjustment for seat height. I took me a while to figure it out. Apperently sometimes it doen't work if you have the seat slid all the way back against the back wall. God I felt like a dumb a$$ when I finally figured that one out after searching the internet for about an hour.

 

He probably freaked out. Having gone through ejection seat training many years ago I can tell you that everyone gets checked out on what those levers do before they let you in the aircraft. You have to pull hard! Lucky for that guy modern ejection seats are all zero/zero types, otherwise he'd have removed himself from the gene pool in a most unusual and spectacular manner!