#two seperate flights to clarify

[thatsrightice]

Martin-Baker is a company that for more than 70 years has specialized in engineering the ejection seats utilized a majority of the world’s fighter jets. They have saved thousands of lives that in otherwise would likely have been lost. Martin-Baker revolutionized an industry that for a long time had been characterized by low survival rates, and in doing so have created an exclusive club very few are able to join, one that unifies aviators in a way that will never be taken away. I’d say only the best of the best are allowed in, but that wouldn’t be true.

A lifetime membership to the Martin-Baker Ejection Tie Club is awarded to those who have ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat, which as a result has saved their life.

These are (some of) their stories…

DAVE “BIO” BARANEK

EJECTEE #4813

For me and my pilot, 19 December 1981 was the date of a memorable excursion in a Martin-Baker ejection seat following a split-second decision to eject. I was an F-14 RIO and we were landing on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean when things went wrong. I was fairly new, but I realized we were in trouble, and when my pilot said “Eject! Eject!” I pulled the lower handle. It happened in the blink of an eye, and only later could I be philosophical about it, to think about leaving the familiar and comfortable cockpit for the unknown. Thanks to the Martin-Baker MK-GRU7A seat my pilot and I survived in excellent condition and have enjoyed 38 (and counting) more years of living, flying, families, and everything else. I am thankful for the skilled US Navy technicians who maintained our equipment and the people of Martin-Baker who provided the seat that saved my life.

CDR. J. R. DAVIS

EJECTEE #4004

Martin-Baker – Thank you for the rest of my life. On 20 March 1987 my F-14A ran away with me as an unwilling passenger. Fire in the environmental control system burned through the flight controls. The airplane started un-commanded pitch oscillations and the last nose down excursion made it clear that I had to eject. My ride in F-14 BuNo 161614 ended 15 seconds before the crash with a Martin-Baker ejection seat and a parachute descent. My wife Sweet Denyse thanks you too.

CDR. TODD A PARKER

EJECTEE #4822

“It was a spring day in 1995 about 200 miles SW of Sicily. The USS Theodore Roosevelt was heading up to the Adriatic to enter the Bosnia conflict. As we expected combat, we needed to make sure as many jets as possible were up and ready so the past few days had been a maintenance blitz. We were conducting a post-maintenance check flight on our F-14 Tomcat, which the jet passed with flying colors.

After the flight we were heading back to the carrier, when suddenly the jet began bucking like a bronco – negative 2 Gs followed by 5 Gs, back and forth for about 1 minute, then it suddenly stopped. We couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but another aircraft joined up and noticed a mismatch in our horizontal stabilators. After two more events similar to the first, each time with the jet losing about 5000 feet, the jet suddenly pitched over into a negative 2 G dive and started rolling uncontrollably. I looked at the altimeter and it read 3000 feet so I pulled the handle. After the loud flash and bang, I found myself under the parachute, and looked down just in time to see the jet hit the water – what turned out to be just 4 seconds after we ejected. We were both safely under parachute, with only minor injuries but alive. We were plucked out of the water by helos from the carrier about 45 minutes later. –

Thanks to Martin-Baker and my Parachute Rigger, I am still alive, and by being able to “live to tell” about our story a major mechanical problem was found. All F-14 Tomcats were subsequently inspected and the same problem was found on dozens of other jets, so Martin-Baker not only saved my life but likely prevented many other aviators from (at best) joining the Tie Club themselves or at worst losing their lives. It was just a month later that a high school friend who heard I was deployed wrote me a letter…We’ve now been married 17 years with two wonderful children. Thank you Martin-Baker!!!

[ithisatanytime]

Charli XCX — Round & Round [fan-made lyric video]

 today was weird in that two separate things i had been thinking about quite a lot recently, one for years, namely that ethopia probably isnt anything like modern ethopia in terms of location and size even conceptually, and i was telling my sister about this today (she loves it everyone loves when i do that) and then coincidentally i found a few seperate quotes from socrates and a few other ancient sources describing aethopia to mean anything south of the nile, and ive been weirdly obsessed with the racial make up of india for a while now, a few years ago it was announced that their shared genetic ancestry with with australian aborigines (damn that is a mouthful i wonder if there is a shorter way of saying it in colloquial australian) and i spent a long time theorizing about how those genes flowed back and forth and how that geneflow was restricted by culture etc. and then i stumbled on that quote below, not only did it clarify my thoughts on that, but it showed once and for all that egyptians were not black they were most similar to north indians at the time so two thousand years ago. i think they were a bit lighter than they are now, i think thats the pattern. you see it play out in real time, i say this without judgement, but white flight is happening again but the media is largely ignoring it, its not impossible to think that in a thousand years or hell even a hundred years, that ethiopians built the eifel tower