Best Of The Web: Martin Baker’s Ejection Seats

When you get to the point in this video where the earnest—OK nerdy—guy explains how Martin Baker plans to blast pilots out of a cockpit with a cordite canon, you'll understand what the British slang "boffin" means. You may also be seized with an overwhelming desire to know what the reaction to this proposal must have been from the pilots and engineers first hearing it.

But by the end of World War II, there no other choices. The footage in the initial part of the video shows how difficult it was to exit an airplane at 300 MPH and jets were soon flying a lot faster than that. This post-wartime film gives an interesting history of how Martin Baker, the leader in ejection systems, developed the technology that has ultimately saved thousands of pilots. It does not, however, explain how they got Lynch to do the second ejection after he had been through the first. (Credit: Martin Baker)