His most recent achievements include being awarded the Council of European Aerospace Societies Gold Medal, (CEAS) in 2019; and a Public Service Silver Medal by the Prime Minister's Office in Singapore in 2021. In fact the student life, with its long vacations during which I did no work but had a pleasant time with my friends in Kent, suited me very well.

That being said, this is a book that is honest and the fact that Hooker thought this also indicates his honesty. Ric is a visiting Professor in Aerospace and Transport Technology at Loughborough University, in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College and in Materials Engineering at Birmingham University, UK. Hooker was excited, and in turn brought Rolls-Royce chairman Ernest Hives to visit Rover's factory in Barnoldswick. In 1952, Hooker was asked by the Folland company whether he could produce a 5,000 lbf (22 kN) thrust engine to power their new lightweight fighter, the Gnat.At this time, in the early 1930s, there were few people in the world studying the effects of compressibility on the flow of air. BAE Systems will collect and process information about you that may be subject to data protection laws. One of the heroes of Stanley Hooker’s first career: Ernest Hives as he looked when Hooker first met him. I, who had never seen an aero engine at close range, and who only had a schoolboy’s knowledge of its inside, did not even know the names of the engines Rolls-Royce was producing. Hooker convinced Hives that pounds of thrust from a gas turbine, puny though the 800 lb from Whittle’s engine sounded when compared with the Merlin’s horsepower, when he told him that the Merlin engine produced 840 lb from the then 70% efficient propeller, but enough to propel the Spitfire at 300 mph.

However his insight is truly unique and the perspective he was privileged too was wonderful to read.

In the late 1980s, test pilot Bill Bedford gave a talk in Christie’s auction room in South Kensington in London. Whittle’s W2 engine, of 1,600 lb thrust, was approved by the appropriate Ministry, but for manufacture by the Rover company, already fully stretched with Bristol air-cooled radial engine production and repair.

Bedford talked about the various fighters he had flown, many of which had been powered by Hooker's engines. He clearly just could not understand that the hordes of villagers and workers greeting their group from RR were almost certainly rounded up and told in no uncertain terms that they would be happy and smiling.Its a story of the incredible development of the jet engine culminating in todays large and successful units. In the late 1950s, the Air Ministry forced through a series of mergers in the aerospace field that left only two airframe companies and two engine companies. I will address one niggle I read from another review stating that Hooker was in some way trying to suggest he was the be all and end all of jet turbines.

During Hooker’s time at Brasenose College, Oxford, he had become friendly with Reginald Verdon Smith, a member of the family controlling Bristol, and Smith has been able, as a director of that company, to visit the then very secret works where Hooker and his team were working on their jet engines.

In the later part of the book he covers his role in helping to promote Rolls Royce engines in Romania and China. The interview seemed to go well, but two months passed before a letter arrived from Ernest Hives, which “ requested my presence at Derby for an interview with Hs [Company parlance for Hives, 1886-1965]. He gracefully brings the reader to live through his recounts how it was to experience many great minds like Whittle, von Karman and Coanda, as well as how it was to live the transition time from the pre-jet engines and pre-civil aviation to the first flight in a jet, to the first commercial flights and then to the first supersonic flights.