Engineer-ed...

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Sorting through the stuff from our aunt's house, some things from her late husband's working past as an aircraft inspector - latterly at BAE Systems - have come to light, including his pocket slide rule and micrometer. Other items include some wonderful documents from his time at De Havilland, such as the pilot's notes handbook, for the Vampire NF.10 jet (pictured) dating to the early fifties, on which he worked: a lovely evocation of a time when knowledge and expertise were both regarded and rewarded accordingly as valuable, rather than as commercial metrics in some mad, capitalist Game of Thrones. People mattered. What they knew mattered. What they could do mattered. Otherwise, people died. One of the areas of modern life where these values still obtain is in aircraft safety and maintenance: proper engineering based fundamentally on the kind of principles that Ian McMurray (for twas he who owned these artefacts) would recognize today, were he still alive. Keep you posted on any more gems from the past...


Comments

  1. Joe Stoner14 February 2022 at 16:32

    Wish you'd tell that to Boeing's senior management mate!

    ReplyDelete

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