However, what grabbed our attention was the sight of a strange little secret aeroplane with bent down wings, which, Roy told us, would take-off and land vertically. That did it for me. We were told that they wanted us so I went home to await the letter of offer. Next week I had my DH visit and was offered a place in the flight test instrumentation department, receiving a letter soon afterwards - but nothing from Kingston. Frustrated I phoned Personnel and asked if Hawker wanted me. “Oh, didn’t we tell you? (Blunder number 1) yes of course we do” they replied. So, in July 1960 I joined the Apprentice Training School where I had to fill in a form in which one question was where I thought I would eventually like to work; I answered Flight Development. After a few weeks in the School I was given my programme of departments to sample - there was no flight Development. (Blunder number 2). The Supervisor told me it was too late change the programme but when I was at Dunsfold I was to go and see Fred Sutton, the Chief Flight Development Engineer, and ask if he would take me in for a couple of weeks. This I did and Fred agreed. The office was on the ground floor of the control tower, and in an adjacent pre-fabricated hut, with the test pilots upstairs. I really enjoyed my time there so I asked Fred if he would like to take me on full time in due course and to my delight he said “yes”.
    In the Summer of 1961, aged 23, I drove down to Dunsfold from Esher to start my first proper job, at £18 per week. I went into the Personnel office in the old parachute building and said I was Chris Farara reporting for duty. This caused the clerk to start frantically thumbing through files in a cabinet finally saying that they didn’t know I was coming and that “Kingston never tells us anything”. (Blunder number 3). As I knew the layout of Dunsfold I was sent on my way to find Flight Development in its new offices at the west end of the Production Hangar.
    The familiar faces were still there: Ambrose Barber, Alan Gettings, Brian Beaumont, and Charlie Phillips. Ambrose and Alan covered aerodynamics (stability and control and performance) while Brian and Charlie did systems (electrics/avionics and hydraulics and fuel/powerplant) but there were no hard divisions. New to me were Eric Ellis in a wheel chair (caused by a motorcycle racing crash on the Isle of Man) who did analysis and Peter Wreford-Bush (Flight Technician Dunsfold), a Hawker man returned from Canadair where he had worked on flight testing the Sabre. Soon we were joined by another graduate, Russ Fairchild. Ambrose was given the job of mentoring me in the ways of the department and teaching me practical flight testing, very different from the theory taught at university. Ambrose and I got on very well together and I count myself very lucky to have had him as my mentor and friend. The department was completed by two young woman trace readers, a records clerk, Bill Dix, and Fred’s secretary Janet. It was a very youthful and happy office with lots of repartee and good natured fun; and what a wonderful place to work, deep in the Surrey countryside in the most beautiful surroundings - with aeroplanes! Bill Bedford was now Chief Test Pilot, Hugh Merewether his deputy, with Duncan Simpson and David Lockspeiser as production test pilots. Altogether a really good small and enthusiastic team led by the reserved and undervalued (except by the pilots) Fred Sutton. A retired naval officer he was technically astute but not comfortable managing people, leaving that to Peter.
    We worked closely with the Experimental Hangar under the Manager, Len Hearsey and Foremen, Alan Wigginton and Bert Hayward, the Instrumentation Department run locally by John Weekes under ‘Jumbo’ Betteridge and the Bristol engine reps, John Vowles and Mike Chittenden who married one of our trace readers, Brenda. The Senior Air Traffic Control Officer was Bertie Coopman who always got the pilots home exactly on time by continually updating their ETAs.
    Each of the flight test engineers was allocated one of the test aircraft so that he became familiar with it. Ambrose’s was XP836, the second P.1127, so I assisted him on that one. I soon had my own P.1127, XP976. We had to fill in the CAT (condition of aircraft for test) form and take it over to Experimental so they could prepare the aircraft in the required engineering and external stores configuration, fuel state which we calculated based on hovering performance using current atmospheric data, instrumentation recorder fit (A13 and CID paper trace and AOP automatic observer panel of photographed dial instruments) and so on. We also had to inform Instrumentation which parameters had to be recorded. The pilot’s briefing note was compiled from the flight test requirements from Kingston specialists, the load sheet and the clearance documents (RDA13 and RDA94). We sat down with the test pilot (TP) as he transferred the test details to his paper roll kneepad.
    When the aircraft was ready we collected the FAF (flight adjustment form), which declared the state of the aircraft, from Experimental and took it to the pilot and had a final talk about any last minute changes, including updated VTO and hover fuel states. We had to weigh the aircraft on the scales in the Production hangar before and after flight to cross check with the instrumentation fuel counter. In the early days of VTOL we filmed every take-off, hover and landing with a 16 mm Bolex camera and had our departmental brown Austin van down by the grid for radio contact with the pilot throughout the test. It was also necessary, for correcting performance data, to measure the outside air temperature with a whirling arm thermometer, obtain the atmospheric pressure with an altimeter and measure the wind speed with a hand-held anemometer, near the grid. We recorded this data on a pro-forma on which we noted details of the flight as it happened, including stopwatch times of cardinal events such as: engine start, full travel control checks, wheels off ground, manoeuvres and touch down. After the flight and a chat with the TP we would do a formal debrief with him, and he would then write up a narrative report from his knee-pad notes. Post flight John Weeks would remove the recorders and take them to his laboratory to unload the paper and film spools and process them. He would call us when they were dry and we would collect them and take them to our office for analysis. We had a film reading box for the AOP and cardboard scales we had made from the trace calibrations provided by Instrumentation. The paper rolls were stretched out on our desks and we compared the record with our stopwatch times and the debriefs and noted any unserviceable parameters for Instrumentation to fix. The pilots, especially Hugh Merewether, would often look through the traces with us as would the local Bristol engine people and visiting engineer Michael Miles.
    Full analysis followed, sometimes with Kingston specialists present; Robin Balmer, Dave Rees and Trevor Jordan might be there to review and collect urgent data, after which we would analyse the records from the series of flights and prepare a formal report, a Flight Development Note (FDN). In those days the more comprehensive Flight Development Reports (FDRs) were often prepared by the TPs with our assistance. This was pre-photocopier so all reports were typed on translucent paper with yellow ‘carbon’ paper face-up behind to give a printable sheet on blue-print machines - very difficult to correct. Thanks to Paul Rash we have all these old reports at Brooklands, together with the 16 mm movie films…and the camera. During the P.1127 testing Ralph Hooper would come down to see how his project was getting on and to observe any development problems with us, down by the grid.
    For spinning trials we had simple telemetry in a hut on the airfield equipped with an instrument panel for a safety TP to monitor altitude and to help the airborne TP identify spin direction if this was unclear. Telemetered aircraft data (control positions, rotation rates, altitude etc) were displayed continuously on pen and paper readouts for simultaneous monitoring by the FT engineers. It was recorded for later analysis.
    Peter Wreford-Bush’s equivalent at Kingston was Nigel Money (Flight Technician Kingston), another returnee from Canada, Avro Canada in this case, where he had worked on the design of the CF105 Arrow. He eventually joined Flight Development and prepared the flight test programmes, instrumentation lists and monthly summary reports which I helped him with. I learned much from him and when he later returned to Kingston I took over as Head of Flight Programmes.
    One winter when I was at home with ‘flu’ Ambrose phoned to say that Fred had asked the office if anyone wanted to go to Germany for three months to work with the Dornier flight test team on their Do.31 VTOL transport programme being done in partnership with de Havilland. Nobody had volunteered so Ambrose advised me to call Fred asap if I wanted to go. My wife was happy so I called and got the job. The Dornier story will have to wait for another time.
    When Folland was taken over by HSA, Gnat Trainer final assembly was moved to Dunsfold together with their flight development (and production) people, who were housed in Nissen hits to the west of the Experimental hangar, to run their test Gnats and ejection seat trials Meteor flown by their test pilots led by Mike Oliver. In due course Fred’s department, which now included Colin Wilson, was merged with the Folland people in the Nissen huts with Fred in charge, Folland’s John Lewendon as Head of Flight Test Operations (FTO) and Peter Wreford-Bush as Head of flight Test Instrumentation (FTI). Most of we Hawker engineers were in FTO with Folland’s Ron Cooper, Peter Amos, Eric Crabbe and others whose names escape me. Also Reg Smyth from Kingston joined me in Flight Programmes.
To be continued.