Marc Fortier was a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force fl ying with Squadron 433. He tells us in his words his amazing story of survival of himself and his watch. While flying the new Supersonic Northrop CF5 airplane on August 21st 1970, we were practicing some dog fi ghting. During one of our maneuvers, my wingman and I collided and my aircraft was cut in half just behind the cannons and ahead of the rudder pedals. The seat belts were deffective and both mine and my wingman's opened under impact. My wingman was projected from his airplane, hit the vertical tail and died instantly. Unable to use the ejection seat due to the lack of restraint, I manually jumped from the airplane and free fell at 120 miles per hour for 20'000 feet since the parachute was not armed for automatic deployment as I had not used the ejection sequence. I fell below the low overcast and barely had time to partially manually deploy my parachute. I landed in a dense forest of tall evergreens, skinned a tree and hung up off the ground, with a broken back and various lacerations. My aircraft with three thousand pounds of fuel still aboard fell close by and burned furiously for an hour. I left a note on the seat, walked out to a nearby lake and was picked up 8 hours later and returned to base.