Good afternoon, I have seen your post on LinkedIn about maintainer stories. I have been a Safety Systems technician since 1980, the first Martin-Baker seat I ever worked on was when Canada purchased the CF-18.
We had mark 10’s in our aircraft, it was a very easy seat to work on back in 1986 at A.E.T.E. in CFB Cold Lake. I then worked for 5 years in Germany first in the maintenance section doing periodic inspection on the CF-18 as well as the complete tear down and rebuild of the ejection seats. When I joined N.F.T.C in 1999 it was with the Harvard 2 which had the Mk16 what an awesome seat to work on, excellent seat. We had an incident where a student accidentally ejected himself while on the tarmac the seat worked as advertised and the student survived the ordeal with minimal injuries. We repaired everything and got the airplane flying again I wish I had kept the pictures but unfortunately I did not. It was great to work on ejection seats that were designed and built by Martin-Baker.
