AINEWS
The 80 year old U.K. firm behind most Western fighter ejection seats tells Defense One it is now asking drone makers what it can build.
On the floor of Farnborough, the head of business development at the world's most famous ejection-seat maker is doing something the company has never had to do: pitching drone builders. Steve Roberts, Martin-Baker's head of business development, told Defense One the firm has reached out to unmanned-aircraft makers and asked, "How can we help?" The concrete offer: launch electronics and payload-destruct hardware.
The 80-year-old U.K. company has saved the lives of more than 7,800 aviators across roughly eight decades of in-flight testing and operational use. That culture (the ejectee ties, the rescued-pilots watch, the in-house tests where mannequins fly out of a jet at the last survivable second) has been Martin-Baker's entire pitch to military buyers. Now the company is hedging.
Roberts, speaking on the sidelines of the Farnborough International Airshow, framed the drone outreach as exploratory: "lots of interest," but no disclosed partner, contract, or product. What he would name is the capability offer. Martin-Baker is pitching its in-house electronics to small drone makers that lack one, plus a payload-destruct system: hardware designed to destroy an unmanned aircraft's warhead if the platform is lost or captured. A third leg is launch-and-recovery gear for uncrewed jets.
The U.S. Air Force's separate decision to halt the F-16 ejection-seat competition, reported by Breaking Defense this month, puts Martin-Baker's current American footprint under quieter review. That footprint spans the F-5, some F-16 blocks, the F/A-18, the F-35, and the T-6, T-38, and T-45 trainers. The rival, RTX's Collins Aerospace, which makes cockpit and life-support systems, supplies the rest of the Western ejection-seat market. The next-generation manned programs (the U.K.-Japan-Italy GCAP fighter, the U.S. Air Force's F-47, and the Navy's F/A-XX) still need escape systems, and Martin-Baker publicly rolled out its new Mk18 seat on Day 1 of the show.
Roberts, who calls Martin-Baker "a life-saving company" whose ethos is rescuing aviators, said unmanned flight "may not take over" in his lifetime. The bridge he does see: "the partially-manned aircraft will be there," and the training fleet still needs to deliver pilots into the air. The partially-manned concept covers aircraft that can fly crewed or uncrewed, often with a human supervising from a ground station or a mothership.
Martin-Baker is treating unmanned flight as a customer rather than a threat, building the launch-and-recovery and payload-destruct hardware now so that when the partially-manned era arrives, the company is already on the airframe. The 7,800-pilot watch on the wall is the implicit insurance: the company that knows how to get a human out alive is the same one a drone builder calls when an unmanned platform needs to fail safely.
The next checkpoint is a named partner. Roberts said Martin-Baker cannot yet report the direction of the work. A disclosed launch-recovery or payload-destruct customer, before the next major airshow, would tell readers whether the pivot is a posture or a contract.