What Is The Martin-Baker Tie Club & What Makes Membership So Exclusive Among Jet Pilots?
While some clubs are free to join, some require membership fees, and others – such as the Martin-Baker Tie Club — require an entirely different initiation ceremony to join.
So, what exactly is this club? Martin-Baker is a manufacturing company that specifically engineers ejection and crashworthy seats, and they have been doing so for almost eight decades now, with 7,789 saved lives as testimony to their success — they clearly know a thing or two about how military jet ejection seats work. The firm has delivered over 90,000 ejection seats, and currently has more than 16,500 in operation — they are world leaders in their field.
The club, is rather more exclusive, and it's much harder (and scarier) to get into. To gain access to their Tie Club, you must have ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat in order to save your own life, and then have the incident verified by Martin-Baker themselves.
What do members of the Martin-Baker Tie Club receive?
Once your ejection has been verified by Martin-Baker, you'll join the ultra-exclusive Tie Club, which consists of members who have had their lives saved by the firm's impressive design. It's worth noting that membership of the club is granted only to those whose lives were saved using a Martin-Baker ejection seat, such as the F-35 ejection seat, and not a design from another brand.
As part of the club, though, members receive a plethora of cool items — namely a certificate, personalized membership card, tie with Tie Club pin, patch, and the option to purchase a members-only Bremont MBI Exclusive Ejectee timepiece. The price of the Bremont watch is kept hidden from the public, and would have to be paid for by the individual member, rather than by Martin-Baker. Martin-Baker is not the only British company that works alongside the high-class watchmaker, as Bremont also helped to design the retro-modern interior of the Radford 62-2.
Members also get the opportunity to share their story via Martin-Baker's website and social media pages, in addition to it being told at air shows, and at Martin-Baker's own facilities. Clearly, Martin-Baker is very proud of the work they do and the lives they save, and rightly so.