Good paper ... Dave Humpherson and I joined Westland's FPO in the spring of 1984. We had come out of the Warton APO so were very much fast jet specialists rather than rotary wingers. I brought a lot of experience in design synthesis and optimisation which went into the nascent performance and synthesis work that had been started by Ron. When the A129 LAH work started I was Ron's sidekick as assistant chief design engineer responsible primarily for the sizing and performance work...that continued to the NH90 and various other projects. I preferred the engineering and computational challenges while Ron was very much the leader and politician. When Ron left I picked up as HoFP which led on to NATO NIAG SG.30 FLBH and various other entertainments, including the Canadian EH101 SAR that ended up as the Cormorant. Then during the AH programme I took leadership of the OA volume of the Apache bid which was interesting as a cat/mouse exercise with Ron who was on the BAE/Eurocopter team. I left in 1997 just as we finished a fairly extensive Lynx Development feasibility study but a few weeks later there was an interesting negotiation that led to my return exactly a year after I had left. The sabbatical was spent on the supersonic transport project which, while going nowhere, was quite entertaining. ... interesting to see Ron's note that I ran the WG.47...memory plays tricks. I think we were juggling a lot of balls at that time and I chipped in the best I could as we finally got the synthesis code working properly. The WG.47....yes there was a lot of fun with the observables and also sorting out single and twin variants.
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