Martin-Baker Aircraft Company

Martin-Baker sells one idea very well. Get the crew out, or take the impact for them. The company was founded in 1934 by James Martin and Valentine Baker as an aircraft builder, turned to escape systems after Baker died in a crash, and has been run by Martin's twin sons since 1979. It remains privately held, with its main plant at Higher Denham in Buckinghamshire, a test airfield at Chalgrove in Oxfordshire, and operations in France, Italy and the United States. More than ninety thousand ejection seats have gone to over ninety air forces and been fitted to some two hundred aircraft types. The company counts close to eight thousand lives saved since 1945, and the survivors join an Ejection Tie Club that has been running since 1957.

The ejection seat range spans several decades of service. The Mk10 arrived in the 1970s and still flies in Tornado, Hawk, Alpha Jet, Mirage and Gripen aircraft, with well over a thousand successful ejections behind it. Naval variants supplied to the United States equip F/A-18 and T-45 fleets. The Mk16 family followed as a lighter design and went into the T-6 Texan II and the T-38, while the Mk16A was drawn specifically to the Eurofighter Typhoon specification and later reworked as the Mk16A NXG using technology from the F-35 programme. The US16E is the seat Lockheed Martin selected for the F-35, the only qualified seat meeting the United States neck injury criteria across the full pilot accommodation range, and it carries oxygen, anti-g, thermal cooling, communications and helmet mounted display services for the pilot. More than fourteen hundred have gone to the F-35 line. The closely related US18E was picked for F-16 Block 70 and 72 aircraft in November 2020, and the Mk18 is the current flagship design.

Crashworthy seating is the quieter half of the business and has been running for around fifty years. Using patented energy attenuation, Martin-Baker builds crew, passenger, utility, troop, gunner, armoured and rotating seats for helicopters and fixed wing aircraft in both military and civil use. The utility seat was certified first for the S-92 and later qualified to Navy and Marine Corps requirements for the CH-53E, and the troop and gunner seats were developed against the crash requirements of the UH-60M. The armoured crew seat uses composite armour alongside the same impact attenuation. Deliveries passed twenty thousand seats more than a decade ago.

Around the hardware sits a support and training operation. Martin-Baker overhauls and repairs seats, supplies spares, parachutes, personal survival packs and seat survival kits, and runs a customer training school covering maintenance from flight line to depot level, including courses on associated systems. Work on spacecraft entry, descent, escape and recovery extends the same discipline beyond aviation. Every seat is a system rather than a chair, tying together a rocket motor, a drogue and main parachute, a survival pack and the sequencing that has to fire in the right order within fractions of a second. Getting that wrong kills people. The company tests to prove it, firing live seats on rocket sleds and from aircraft at Chalgrove, and the resulting service record is the argument it takes to customers.