From Ken Hancock
Your item on gluteal frostbite (Feedback, November 13) took me back to when I was an RAF navigator in high-flying, light bombers in the 1950s. We sat strapped into our ejector seats over our parachutes, with our survival kit on top of those; the last layer of the kit was a bag of water.
So of course as soon as we got to altitude we were sitting on a block of ice for a number of hours. This did not result, as far as I know, in clinical frostbite, but numb bums were standard and haemorrhoids an occupational hazard.
Ottawa, Canada
