John is the bestselling co-author of Tornado Down and author of many highly acclaimed epics, including Spitfire, Lancaster and Tornado, all of which were Sunday Times bestsellers. 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. I especially liked the way several airmen’s and navigator’s stories were interwoven through the book as it progressed. It was partly due to the death of Squadron Leader William Davie, a 25-year-old test pilot who died after attempting to bail out of his Gloster Meteor in August 1943 – plummeting through the roof of a hangar at Farnborough – that prompted the Air Ministry finally to commission Martin to come up with a workable British system. For John Nichol to produce this book must have taken nerves of steel and a huge chunk of mental toughness, backed by massive friends and family support.

Packed with interviews with aircrew who know exactly how it feels to 'Bang Out' from an aircraft at high speed, both in peace and in war, the book gives the reader a vivid sense of what that life-saving experience feels like, but also features the moving accounts of what happens next, from the viewpoint of both the crews and their families, who often have little or no information about whether or not their loved ones have survived.John is a member of The Royal British Legion's Gulf War Group helping veterans with Gulf War Syndrome and a patron of the British Ex-service Wheelchair Sports Association. No one would ever want to have to use an ejection seat, but thank goodness some people have – and have lived to tell the tale. The fact that he’d never designed or built a plane and had never even flown did not seem to deter him. He has made a number of TV documentaries with Second World War veterans, written for national newspapers and magazines, and is a widely quoted commentator on military affairs.

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. We see how the technology was adapted when the prospect of crashing in North Vietnam was sometimes preferable to ejecting and risking capture; what happens to the body when it is catapulted from an aircraft under great force; how an ejectee can be rescued from enemy territory. John is the best-selling author of Tornado Down, five novels, and the highly acclaimed WWII history books, The Last Escape, Tail-End Charlies and Home Run.He devised and presented 2 series of Survivors, interviewing newsmakers who have been through life changing experiences.

When Jo Lancaster, the first British pilot to eject in an emergency, triggered his ejection seat in 1949, it took thirty seconds before he was safely away from the aircraft and under his parachute. In Germany, Heinkel had fitted their turbojet-powered fight He-280 with a catapult seat escape system, and on January 13 1942, the Luftwaffe’s Wolfgang “Bombo” Schenck became the first man to use an ejection seat in an emergency. For me , the amount of technical information was just about right and it was great reading about one of our leading edge companies that develops fabulous products that are sold at home and abroad. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Captured, tortured and held as a prisoner of war, John was paraded on television, provoking worldwide condemnation and leaving one of the most enduring images of the conflict. A few days later, having been beaten and tortured, images of Nichol and his pilot John Peters were broadcast around the world. Packed with interviews with aircrew who know exactly how it feels to ‘Bang Out’ from an aircraft at high speed, both in peace and in war, the book gives the reader a vivid sense of what that life-saving experience feels like, but also features the moving accounts of what happens next, from the viewpoint of both the crews and their families, who often have little or no information about whether or not their loved ones have survived.

On active duty in the Gulf he was shot down on the first low-level, daylight raid of the first Gulf War. As a final aside, I love the design of these books and how good they all look together on the shelf! At its end I could only reflect on the nature of war and the risks we ask our pilots to take on and whether technology will advance so much that seat technology will be rendered obsolete with pilotless aircraft. begins with Nichol interviewing Lancaster, whose story serves as an important reminder that, as well as being a book about engineering, this is fundamentally a book about “what it means to be given another chance”. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Sadly, although I chose it because I was fascinated by modern ejection-seat technology , it was the human stories that achieved most impact on me. is fuelled by dramatic, deeply moving and previously unheard first-hand accounts by ejectees and their families. This rather begged the question of whether the human body could in fact withstand the force of the explosion. Nichol tells the story of the brave men who risked their lives testing those early devices, and interviewed the first British pilot to eject back in 1949, when ejection, from pulling the handle to being under the parachute, took thirty seconds.