Balshaw's Grammar School

[jwhi]

(19-Oct-2017 09:32 PM)anacortesdamp Wrote:  EE Aviation had facilities at Warton, Samlesbury and Strand Road. The Strand Road factory complex had airplane construction in the long building on the Preston side of the street. Planes were built in modules small enough (with appropriate Police escorts) to be moved by road to Samlesbury. There, the complete airplane was put together, had an initial test flight, which landed at Warton if all was well.

Most of my industrial experience for my Dip.Tech. was at Warton. EE and its follow-on BAC, were excellent mentors for an engineering apprentice. Each of my two years at Blackpool Tech and subsequent 4 years at Salford were "Sandwich Courses" - Six months full time at college, then 6 months full time in the industry. The industrial sessions were a whirlwind, as students were moved from group to group every month. I was lucky to get three successive months on Flight Test Instrumentation, reading and copying flight test recordings for use in our early computer design systems.

The experience was very useful after I joined Boeing. I was able to get up to speed very quickly and got good performance reviews. I worked firstly in Hydraulics and Flight Controls, doing lab tests on systems. Later, I was in Crew Training Simulator Engineering, updating the software to keep up with airplane design changes. My last 11 years was in Customer Engineering, where I acted as a liaison between Boeing and the engineering departments of airlines buying new airplanes.

I eventually got fed up with all the overseas travel. Most of the customers I dealt with were in the Middle East, a 20-hour journey through Heathrow. I asked for a different assignment and was refused, so I took early retirement just 3 weeks before my 58th birthday. A few weeks later, I went back in as a "job shopper", the local name for an employee of a company which supplies short-term engineering help to bigger companies. I finally bagged the whole thing, only to come out of retirement a year later to be a bus driver for our county's transit agency. Two years of getting up at 03:30, 5 days a week, to go drive a bus for 8 hours finally got to me, and I took full retirement.


Frank

An interesting career Frank...........were you at BAC at the time of TSR2? I can't remember just when it was though I recall the disappointment when it was cancelled.
Did you find a marked difference between the work regimes and cultures of BAC and Boeing?
When I was a project manager at Leyland we were joined by a Chief Engineer from GM and a team of project people ex-Ford......the contrast in style between them and us was interesting!

I retired early from lecturing, after opting to go part-time for a couple of years. I thought I'd try to develop my painting business which had ticked over for more than 30 years, but somehow lost a lot of inspiration despite having much more time! I still exhibit pictures and sell a few locally but far fewer than I used to do.