Did you know the F-104's first prototype had an ejection seat that fired the pilot downward?

The XF-104, the Starfighter prototype, featured an unusual Stanley B downward-firing ejection seat. The reason was fear that the seat designs of the era lacked enough explosive power to clear the aircraft's tall T-tail. Early production Starfighters kept the idea with the Stanley C-1, also fired downward, out of the same doubt about an upward-firing seat's ability to clear the T-tail. If the seat failed to fire, the pilot could manually release the fuselage's lower hatch and bail out by gravity.

Downward ejection posed obvious problems for low-altitude escapes. Twenty-one USAF pilots, including test pilot Captain Iven Carl Kincheloe Jr., failed to get out of their crippled aircraft in low-altitude emergencies because of this system. The whole assembly was also far more complex than a traditional upward-firing seat: more moving parts meant more chances of failure and more maintenance time and expertise.

Stanley Aviation eventually developed the Lockheed C-2, which fired upward with more powerful rocket catapults. The C-2 was indeed able to clear the tail, though it retained a minimum speed limitation of 90 kn (104 mph; 167 km/h). Many export Starfighters were later modified with Martin-Baker Mk.7 "zero-zero" seats, usable at zero altitude and zero speed. With the arrival of the C-2, the era of the downward-firing ejection seat quietly came to an end.