RAF navigator shares gripping history of parachutes and ejection seats
At a recent meeting of Ludlow Probus Club, members enjoyed a talk titled "Coming Down to Earth" by David Trotter.
David was a Navigator in the RAF, so it was important that he was trained to escape the aircraft safely.
Once Air Balloons were invented, the challenge to jump out to safety was paramount. In 1783, the first recorded parachute jump was made in France in 1785 to demonstrate a safe departure from a balloon. It was made more compact and crucially, silk was the preferred material because of its strength and demonstrated in 1797. In the early 1900s rapid design progress resulted in the backpack system. Balloons were superseded by aircraft but safely exiting remained a challenge. Bi-planes had an open cockpit so inverting the aircraft and falling out solved this.
In 1919 the first free drop home-made parachute was demonstrated in California by Leslie Irvin. This impressed the USAF and RAF and became standard equipment. The Irvin factory produced 15,000 a week during WW2.
The advent of jet aircraft presented further challenges. Sir James Martin founded a factory in Denham to develop a suitable system for ejection. Between 1944 and 1946 lots of trials were conducted using special rigs. In July 1946 a seat was ejected from a jet fighter aircraft at 8,000 feet. This is an amazing achievement in such a short timeframe.
The huge challenge of controlling the g-force effect on the human body during ejection was overcome. The first dummy shot was made on August 17, 1945 and live human shot on August 22 and was a success. Engineering challenges to make the whole system as automatic as possible continued throughout the late 1940s.The MB1 seats were installed in all new service jet aircraft. Fully automatic seats were necessary to make the system more efficient which resulted in the MB4 seats which use rocket assisted seats and gives the aircrew a recovery rate of 93%.
Sir James Martin was widely recognised by the multitude of awards he received from various prestigious institutions. As of January 2026, 7,812 lives have been saved by the use of Martin Baker seats.
Our speaker also experienced the value of ejection seats. Shortly after take-off in 1975, his pilot gave the order to eject. These seats worked as expected and both survived. David has a letter of reply from Sir James to whom he had written a letter gratitude for the ejection seat system.
The Caterpillar Club was formed for those members who had ejected from an aircraft. David is a member and is entitled to wear a special tie and the award is a gold tie pin of a caterpillar.
Report by Martin Thomas
The Probus Club of Ludlow meets twice monthly on Tuesdays at the Maskel Centre in Ludlow, where members enjoy a wide range of interesting and informative talks.
