I serviced, maintained and fitted your ejection seats for the bulk of my 15 years as an Armourer in the Royal Air Force at both first-line and second-line levels. I worked on seats fitted to aircraft types including Phantom FGRII, Hawk, Tucson, Jet Provost, Hunter to name a few. My Phantom years at Wildenrath (92 Sqn) are the years I remember with the greatest fondness, even if it did seem to involve lifting and refitting countless seat-pans because of a dropped pen or other cockpit ‘foreign’ items!
I am also very, very proud even in my twilight years that 6 aircrew went home to their kids because they ejected successfully in seats I had personally fitted and maintain. Two of the incidents were Phantom ejections and the other a Tucano. The Tucano incident was the first time that Martin-Baker seats had been used to eject from that aircraft type in RAF service.
I was also on the team that accepted the Tucano into RAF service, and as such was one of the first RAF personnel to remove, refit and service those seats as the type came into service.
