Mike Sutton > Quotes

“The Martin-Baker tie – dark-blue silk, patterned with the red triangular warning sign – is worn by members of the Ejection Tie Club: the 7,000 pilots whose lives had been saved after an emergency ejection from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat. The first proper use of the seat was in May 1949, when a pilot named Jo Lancaster survived ejecting from an early jet bomber over Warwickshire. Martin-Baker seats were highly revered. We trusted them with our lives every single day. Not that I had any desire to wear the blue-and-red silk tie.”
― Mike Sutton, Typhoon

“I thought about how, when you get airborne, you leave the normality of life on earth and enter a little personal cosmos. Every flight has its own quirks and peculiarities, but there is a recurring rhythm, like the flow of a story with a beginning, middle and end. That’s why life as a pilot is so engaging. A career is made up of a bookshelf of diverse stories. When you close your eyes in bed at night, you reflect on the chapter of that particular day. It is a moment of completeness. Tomorrow a new page will be turned, and you never know how the tale will unfold.”
― Mike Sutton, Typhoon