That guy's death was apparently complicated by a chain of failures: user error with the safety pin, user error with the firing handle, maintenance/construction error with some bolt, and several aspects of the M/B design that allowed all failures to happen at once. Overall, those seats have saved some 7500 pilots (search for the tie club) and maybe killed a few: similar odds and debate to airbag deployments.

ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sean_Cunningham_(pilo...