the seats saving pilots for decades

If you don’t recognise the name, you will certainly remember the face: John Nichol was the navigator on the RAF Tornado shot down over Iraqi territory on the first day of the First Gulf War in January 1991. A few days later, having been beaten and tortured, images of Nichol and his pilot John Peters were broadcast around the world.

That the two men survived their ordeal was due not only to their bravery and resilience but also – obviously – to the existence of aircraft ejection seats. Nichols has already told their story in Tornado Down (1992), and has since gone on to write more than a dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction.

As one might perhaps expect of a former RAF officer, Nichol is an efficient and diligent writer; but he’s also rather wry, and has a nice eye for the curious detail. Most works of popular narrative non-fiction could be written by anyone with a small amount of talent, as well as enough time, energy, commitment and a decent library. But given his extraordinary personal experience, his particular skills and knowledge, Eject! Eject! is clearly a book that Nichol and Nichol alone was destined to write.

At almost 500 pages, the book is comprehensive, detailing the development and uses of the ejection seat in combat and in crashes, from World War II all the way through to recent systems designed specifically for female aircrew. The first woman to qualify as an RAF fast-jet flying instructor reveals to Nichol that she would have to stuff flight reference books into her G-suit pockets in order to increase her weight, in the hope of avoiding ejection injury on account of the seats being designed for heavier men.

Nichol is perhaps at his best in his account of the early work of the Martin-Baker Aircraft Company, the pioneering British manufacturer of ejection seats, whose products – as of the date of publication – have saved 7,681 lives. (Nichol was ejectee number 6,089.)

James Martin, an Ulsterman from Co Down, the son of a farmer, arrived in England in 1919 aged 16 with £10 in his pocket. “He had no qualifications, no job, no contacts, and no workshop.” He started out by buying army surplus trucks, modifying them and selling them on. “I had the notion,” wrote Martin, “that I wanted to design things and not be employed by anyone” – a fine ambition. 

In 1928, he moved to Denham in Buckinghamshire, where he hung a sign on the front of an old linoleum factory, “Martin’s Aircraft Works”. The fact that he’d never designed or built a plane and had never even flown did not seem to deter him. Fortunately, he soon teamed up with an actual pilot, Valentine Baker, who became his co-designer. It was only after Baker died in 1942 during the test flight of a prototype fighter plane that Martin turned his thoughts to designing an ejection seat.

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