Manually Activating/Skipping stages at launch?

[Tortoise]

I have a backup stage, where if anything goes wrong then a backup rocket will fire up and the kerbals will seperate from the rocket and fly away. Then the parachutes will open up. But if nothing goes wrong, how do I skip that stage? Or if something does, how do I manually activate iti?

Edited July 14, 2013 by Tortoise

[SnappingTurtle]

To make an escape tower in my rockets I set the command pod decoupler and separation rockets to the abort key in the action groups editor. Press backspace to abort. I attach the escape tower with docking nodes or a stack decoupler so it can be detached by right-clicking and choosing to decouple.

[Tortoise]

Thanks, I learned how to use an abort key.

[fran13kie]

You can also switch the stage order during flight by dragging them with your mouse if you don't want to abort.