Your local B-52 Air Force vet is still recovering, and in a lot of pain.
But yes, we had 6 ejection seats in the B-52H model, 4 upstairs and 2 downstairs. The two guys downstairs had to depend on the aircraft commander and pilot to "yank and bank" the jet in the last few seconds so they had a good chance of ejecting into clear sky vs. the trees, terrain, or water. A BUFF crash out of K.I. Sawyer AFB a few years ago resulted in a downstairs ejection sequence into the trees that mangled the radar nav and bomb nav so badly, they didn't even take them out of the body bags for post-mortem X-rays. I talked to the X-Ray tech, and he said EVERY bone in their bodies was so shattered, death was instantaneous. He knew they were the downstairs navigators, because of the wiz wheels, pens, pencils, etc. in their pockets.
B-52G and H ejection sequence is inititiated by making sure your ankles are against the base of the seat (important if you don't want legs amputated at knee-level), then rotating the rings at the end of your seat's armrests completely upright. This arms the seat, at which point you look upwards to watch the overhead hatch. The act of arming the seat is *supposed* to release the hatch hinges and pop up a little air spoiler in the hatch to make it separate cleanly from the jet. No hatch separation, no ejection sequence - you'll punch yourself into a hatch on the way out. As you're looking up confirming hatch separation, you pull the trigger bars inside the rings to get the seat moving. This is where the old saying "Rotate and Squeeze" comes from, BTW. The seat, with seat survival kit, parachute, and you aboard punches out of the jet, and within 1/2 second of departing the jet, this nasty little thing called a "man-seat separator" kicks you in the small of the back like a mule, relieving you of a ballistic trajectory caused by several hundred pounds of used ejection seat. That leaves you, your parachute, and seat kit to dangle enroute to the ground.
If all's well, you can deploy your chute, or rely on your aneroid barometer mechanism to pop the canopy before the minimum altitude. Then you run through a mental checklist before your feet hit the ground or water. "Canopy - visor - mask - seat kit - LPU..." and so forth. The joke at egress school was that you waited to release your canopy from the harness until the cold water came up past your ankles, NOT when the warm liquid went down your legs. I always thought the ejection seat trainer would make a fun amusement park ride, because you're strapped in to a seat with functional pneumatic ram, the only difference being you stay in the seat at the end of the stroke. Woo-hoo!
If it's not all well, it doesn't really matter, because they aren't Zero-Zero ejection seats, and God wasn't with you on that day.
CSAR uses the term "Recovery" to describe living aircrew retrieved post-crash, btw. Don't read too much into it.
