Survival Knives

It would be fair to say that ANY knife you have with you in a survival situation is a survival knife. That being said, one of the first survival knives of the modern era is the pilot’s survival knife, a production military model with a hollow handle that contained items such as fishing line, matches, etc., capped with a screw-on pommel backed with a compass in some versions, and a sawback blade, the latter for cutting through the fuselage of downed aircraft if the user were trapped inside one. In the early 1980s, Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall-Of-Fame© member Jimmy Lile made a similar knife, though handmade and of a higher quality and materials than the pilot’s survival knife, for use by the title character in the movie, First Blood. From that point forward, similar versions were produced by the score by factory and custom makers alike throughout the 1980s. Today, survival knives run the gamut, from the sawback/hollow-handle version to any knife you have with you in a survival situation.