Martin-Baker and Bremont Watch Company have announced a partnership to design and build the ultimate aviation watch. The alliance will produce a unique aviation watch that will embody all that is meant by ‘Made in Britain’. The watch is on display on the Martin-Baker stand ( Hall 2B, Stand E93) here at Le Bourget, Paris.

As the inventor of the Ejection Seat and supplier to over 70% of the Western worlds’ air forces, Martin-Baker is at the pinnacle of British engineering. The new partnership combines Martin-Baker’s knowledge of testing, materials and design with Bremont’s watchmaking skills. The goal is to challenge conventional mechanical watch design, by applying to it the standards which determine the integrity of a device that truly define ‘a matter of life and death’.

An Ejection Seat may sit for 40 years, but the day it is used, it has to work. As a Company, their testing facility is unique, and one of its facilities will endow the new watch with a trial found nowhere else: the ability to simulate 30 years of aircraft life through a vibration machine, during a 4-hour test.

A combined Bremont/Martin-Baker team has been formed to design and test the new watch, to be called the MB1. Although the movement will be assembled at Bremont’s atelier in Switzerland, all final assembly of the watches will take place in the UK. The MB1 will be Bremont’s first ‘Made in Britain’ wristwatch.

Exclusivity of the first edition of the Bremont MB1 is unparalleled in the watch industry: it will only be available for purchase to those who have been ejected using a Martin-Baker Ejection Seat. Martin-Baker seats have saved over 7283 lives to date; each watch will be engraved with the individual’s ejection number.

The second edition of the watch, Bremont MB2, will be available for sale alongside with the full range of Bremont watches, but – as with all Bremont timepieces – the annual production will be very limited.

Testing, which has been taking place over the last six months, includes live ejection seat launches. This is the first time that Martin-Baker has ever ejected a watch on one of their live launches.