A plane crash is not usually something anyone celebrates. Martin-Baker, the British company that builds ejection seats for military aircraft, celebrates every single one.
Every time one of its seats saves a life, the company posts about it. Then it contacts the person who ejected and welcomes them to the tie club.
How you get in
You cannot apply in the ordinary sense. The member has to contact the company with the date of their ejection and a description of the incident. If it checks out, Martin-Baker assigns a number and ships the prize that has been the symbol of membership since 1957: a navy blue silk tie with red triangles, matching the warning markings painted on the sides of jets to tell ground crews there is an ejection seat in the cockpit. With it comes a membership card carrying the unique ejection number, a certificate, a patch and a pin.
By the company’s count, 7,827 lives have been saved since the first successful ejection in 1949. Steve Roberts, a Martin-Baker executive, provided the breakdown that gives the whole thing its flavour: one pilot has ejected four times, nine have ejected three times, and 256 have ejected twice. The four-timer was an Air Force F-4 reconnaissance officer.
Members wear the ties to airshows and military functions, which the reporting describes as a considerably cooler version of a fraternity sweater.
The watch nobody wears
In 2009 the club got an upgrade. The British watchmaker Bremont designed the MBI, silver with red trim, for members only. The company will etch a member’s tie-club number on the back of the barrel along with their name or call sign and the date they ejected.
The tie is free. The watch is not — about $5,000 at retail, sold to ejection survivors at cost. Pilots often chip in and buy one for a colleague.
Ron Bath broke his neck and his back when he was ejected from his jet nearly forty years ago. Years later, by then a major general working at the Pentagon, he got a phone call in his office. The caller had a British accent and was offering him the watch, provided he supplied a credit card to cover the tax.
“I thought it was a scam,” Bath said.
It was not. Six months later a leather box arrived with his personalised MBI. He has never worn it in public. “It’s a gorgeous thing. I’d be afraid to wear it.” He wears a $150 Glycine Airman he bought at a base exchange instead. A collector once offered him $12,500 for the MBI. He intends to pass it to his daughter.
The other joke, and the other club
Pilots of the B-2 used to joke that if you tried to eject, a figure would appear on the screen wagging a finger: “You’re not ejecting out of a $2.2 billion airplane. Get your butt back in here.” One of them, Grieve, ejected for real when his B-2 crashed taking off from Guam in 2008. Like Bath, he broke his back. Like Bath, he recovered fully and returned to flying.
Collins Aerospace started its own fraternity in 1979, the Grasshopper Club — plaque, patch, pin and a coin. Its seats have saved 730, including several Air Force F-15E crews shot down over Iran this year. The club went quiet for a while and has been revived by Rob Makros, a retired Air Force pilot with several friends who are alive because of their seats.
Both companies host members at their plants. After retiring from the Air Force and flying for the airlines, Grieve went to the Collins factory in Colorado to meet the people who build the seats and talk about his ejection. “To go out and kind of do the tour and meet the people and you know tell the stories…it was really cool. High-fives all around.”
Why this is in a money paper’s reading list
Because of the number. A company that could reasonably never mention the circumstances of its product’s use instead keeps a running, numbered, publicly posted tally of every single time it worked — and gives each one a name, a date and an object.
Almost nothing in financial life gets counted that way. The disasters get counted. The losses get counted, argued over and reported quarterly. The things that quietly worked — the cash that was there when the roof went, the insurance nobody needed to claim on until they did, the plan that held when the household lost an income — those have no register and no tie.
It is worth keeping your own list. Not to admire it. So that the next time the urge arrives to replace a plan that has been doing its job, there is a written record of the times it caught you.