Bristol aerospace icons--then and now: David Farrar OBe CEng MA FRAeS FRSA HonFIED looks back at 100 years of iconic aerospace engineering projects in Bristol. (2025)

The word icon originated from Byzantine and Greek religious paintings, but one of its meanings today includes: 'characterised by fame'.

The use of the word when describing products and designs arose from the British Design Council's nominations from the 1940s onward (although in those days it was known as the Council of Industrial Design). Such design icons included the London Underground Railway's map, the London omnibus, and the Concorde aircraft.

What makes a design icon?

Evidently visual appeal had a high ranking in the Design Council's judgement. Difficulty, size and complexity of engineering projects do not necessarily qualify for fame. Projects such as nuclear power stations seem to not be regarded as icons. Some British aircraft, such as the Comet, might have become so, but were dogged by failures.

The vital ingredient seems to be that a project catches people's imagination. Thus, the atomic bomb would be an icon of the first half of the 20th century, and the Apollo Project an icon of the second half.

The latest iconic engineering project was launched on 23 October, 2008. The Bloodhound SSC aims to break the landspeed record and will be the first car to achieve 1000 miles an hour (Engineering Designer, January/February 2009). At the project's launch Lord Drayson, Minister of State for Science and Innovation, described the project's iconic status and purpose as: "a catalyst for the next generation of British engineers."

The design team is based in Bristol, and they are now showing the world, via the internet and in real time, how a complex engineering product is actually designed and by whom. But the Bloodhound SSC will not be the first iconic design to emerge from Bristol.

One hundred years of aerospace at Bristol

In 1909 the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company was set up in Bristol. It became famous in the 1930s as the Bristol Aeroplane Company, making a twin engined monoplane, the 'Britain First' (or Bristol Type 142), which was faster than the fighter aircraft of the time. A celebration of 100 years of aerospace at Bristol can be found on www.bristolaero.com and the anniversary is being marked in Bristol in several ways.

Within living memory there have been aerospace engineering projects at Bristol which might qualify as 'iconic'. I have been fortunate to have been associated with five of them. Some were a world first, others were commercially successful (sometimes both).

'40s

1940s--A passenger aircraft to fly the Atlantic non-stop

This was just possible with eight of the largest piston engines available, clever streamlining, very light structure, and much new technology, in the Brabazon aircraft.

The fatal flaw was a failure to predict technical improvements which permitted smaller faster aircraft, such as the Constellation, to be more economic, despite limited range. With the turboprop, the Britannia, the next Bristol aircraft, was the first to achieve the non-stop objective, but American jet aircraft were soon to do so, eventually with lower fares.

1940s--An aeroplane to carry cars and trucks

The Bristol Freighter was a simple aircraft designed to carry two three-ton trucks. It proved amazingly versatile, carrying more than 600,000 cars with passengers to France, pilgrims to Mecca, beef from farms, equipment to mines, racehorses to races, and passengers on local flights. It sprayed locusts and bombed terrorists.

The aircraft was a commercial success--over 200 were made.

'50s

1950s--A guided missile air defence system for Britain

In 1949 I started building an engineering team at Bristol to undertake a secret project known as 'Job 1220'. Clearly something so secret was unlikely to ever be famous.

'Job 1220' became 'Red Duster', and a very large number of companies and Government establishments became involved. The emerging guided weapon's progress (or occasionally the lack of it) was reported monthly to a concerned British Cabinet, because it was needed to defend the nuclear deterrent.

Before production started, the Bristol Managing Director, Cyril Uwins, noted that the missile tracked its target all the way from launch and, as all Bristol projects had names which started with B, he appropriately named it the Bloodhound. It quietly went into service in Britain, without attracting much attention. It was the first British ground to air guided weapon to be exported, to Sweden and Australia as a complete defence system.

'50s

1950s--A worldwide, air and land transportable missile air defence system

The next generation of missile air defence in Britain went through several stages of evolution, during which corporate politics condemned the Bristol guided weapons team to extinction. The team was vulnerable and two attempts to eliminate it were made.

A suggestion by FW Higginson, GW Sales Director, during a ten minute car journey resulted in a Bloodhound I missile being rapidly modified to continuous wave guidance by Ferranti. This missile destroyed the target aircraft with a direct hit. The other contractors had not reached this stage, so the Bristol Bloodhound 2 was born. It was designed and developed within budget and on programme for the Royal Air Force, Sweden and Switzerland. Its speed, long range and advanced features gave it a very long service life, during which it was deployed as a deterrent in many World trouble spots.

'60s

1960s--A supersonic transatlantic passenger aircraft

British Government and industry studies had defined the main features of a supersonic transport aircraft and indicated that, with good structural and aerodynamic design, its operating economics would be close to those of subsonic aircraft.

Concorde was successfully developed under an Anglo-French agreement, and saw airline service for several decades. Its operating economics were not as good as had been forecast and the gap widened, as subsonic technologies improved, until it was withdrawn from service.

This aircraft is an undoubted icon. On one occasion a Concorde, nose drooped undercarriage down, flew low over Crystal Palace Park, where a summer evening symphony concert was being performed. The noise from the four Olympus engines completely blotted out the music. The audience then applauded. A BOAC/BA Concorde (G-BOAF) is on display at its Bristol home in Filton.

1960s--An aircraft which flies into space.

When international collaboration commenced on the Space Shuttle design, Bristol supplied two British teams. They designed the payload bay doors and digital instrumentation in Rockwell's winning bid for development.

'70s

1970s--First European geostationary satellite

Bristol led the STAR consortium in designing and building Geos, the first European geostationary scientific satellite, which was launched from Cape Canaveral by a Delta rocket.

1970s--First British missile capable of destroying anti-ship missiles

The Bristol team had much understanding of anti-missile defence, and their designs (including a vertically launched version suitable for small ships) won the development contract for Sea Wolf. The team demonstrated the safety of vertical launch in test firings in the 1970s.

Bristol engineers led the subsequent development, during which the missile destroyed an Exocet anti ship missile, and intercepted a 4.5 inch shell. During the Falklands conflict, Sea Wolf was fired in defence by ships of the British Navy. From the 1980s, the vertically launched version defended Type 23 frigates.

'80s

1980s--First close up pictures of a comet's nucleus

The Giotto spacecraft performed a close fly-by of two comets, and was the first to return from interplanetary space and perform an earth fly-by.

2000s

2000s--Dan Dare and the birth of Hi-Tech Britain in the 1950s

In 2008-9 the Science Museum in London showed the technological innovations of the 1950s. The Bloodhound I missile was the largest and most striking exhibit, correctly shown as part of a complex weapon system, and displayed as an icon.

As an innovation, a website was set up to enable memories of the exhibits to be shared and comments to be made. The Bloodhound Missile's page can be found at http://objectwiki. sciencemuseum.org.uk/wiki/Bloodhound_Anti-Aircraft_Missile.

2000s--A car to reach 1000mph

The project was launched in 2008 and the design team has been set up at Bristol.

The team's Chief Aerodynamicist, Ron Ayers, also worked on the Bloodhound Missile design team. Project Director Richard Noble paid a great compliment to the surviving members of the Bloodhound Missile team by naming the car Bloodhound SSC.

On this project, for the first time ever, the world can share the problems and decisions in engineering design, know the engineers' thoughts and concerns, and follow all the stages of development--all via the internet. At last, a great light is now shining on the work of the engineering designer.

In my opinion, this alone makes the project iconic, and I strongly recommend readers to access the website (www. bloodhoundssc.com/car/the_scientific_and_engineering_challenge.cfm).

Family resemblances

The Bloodhound SSC does not just share the missile's name. Surprisingly, there are many similarities in design decisions in the missile and car, despite a 50 year gap between them.

One example is configuration design. Both the homing head in the Bloodhound Missile and the driver in the car need a clear field of view, while the air intake for the jet needs a clean entry airflow. In the missile design, ten configurations were studied in series to find the best configuration. The first was the 'obvious' one--a big ramjet with a homing head in the intake centre cone. Guidance range would be too limited, so a series of configurations followed with smaller ramjets in various positions.

At the fourth and fifth configurations, we were amazed to see them in the 'Eagle' being flown by the cartoon character Dan Dare and his opponents.

The Ministry were concerned at the time about the possibility of a security leak, but none was found. Fortunately, as we went on towards the final configuration of Bloodhound, 'Eagle' failed to follow them. The final configuration, with moving wings, minimised body rotation in pitch and yaw, both to give better flow into the ramjet intakes and to avoid homing head guidance errors of various sorts.

Bloodhound SSC has followed a similar course. To maintain good wheel contact with the ground, it is also essential to minimise any tendency to body pitch or yaw. Dual engine air intakes proved inferior to a single intake, which ingeniously uses the conical driver's canopy to produce the first compression shock, while giving him adequate visibility over a shallow fore body (it echoes the first intake configuration studied for the missile).

There are other similarities. At speed, the air round both is hotter than boiling water. Both projects reduce drag by area ruling (in the missile the intakes widen where the body narrows). In both projects, the centre of gravity has to be decided by the aerodynamic centre, to minimise body rotation. Both use telemetry. Bloodhound SSC uses digital control and health monitoring, Bloodhound 2 had the first real time control by computer--the Ferrranti Argus. Computer modelling of airflow and structure aids the design process for the car or flight path for the missile.

A significant difference is that the guided missile, being expendable, was simplified by putting much of the complexity into the ground part of the system. Bloodhound SSC has to carry the complexity with it as part of the challenge.

NAMING THE ENGINEERS

As the project is so public and has received so much media attention, the world will get to know the Bloodhound SSC engineers very well professionally. However, the engineers who worked on the previous iconic projects are unlikely to receive the same level of fame.

I have searched the internet in vain for those who played major design roles in the other projects named in the article. Of all the many people involved, only two earlier Bristol aeronautical engineers could be found on the internet: Sir Archibald Russell (a founder member of the Institution of Engineering Designers) and myself (David J Farrar). Both can be found on www.wikipedia.org.

A complex engineering project is never designed in one organisation or by one person. In recognition, and to complete this celebration of 100 years of Bristol Aerospace icons, some of the principal organisations and names appear below.

Concorde

At Bristol: Bill Strang, Doug Thorne, Mick Wilde, Doug Vickery.

At Rolls Royce Bristol: Peter Calder, Pierre Young.

Bristol Freighter

Alec Symon.

Bloodhound Missile

At Bristol: Hugh Metcalfe.

At Ferranti: Norman Searby, Denis Best.

At Rolls Royce Bristol: Robin Jamison, Mike Nedham.

At the Royal Radar Establishment, Malvern: Bill Penley, Andy Smart.

Space Shuttle contribution

Brian Raybold, John Bircham.

Geos

Don Rowley, Ray Munday.

Sea Wolf

Graham Felton, Phil Rosser.

Giotto

Ray Munday, Geoff Crowder

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Bill Morgan for a preview of the full list of Bristol aerospace achievements, and Don Rowley and Charles Halton for sharing memories of them.

Do you have any memories of iconic projects? Do you feel a design has been left out of this article? Please send any letters or comments to the editor by emailing editorial@ engineeringdesigner.co.uk or send them to: Engineering Designer, Ewell House, Graveney Road, Faversham, Kent ME13 8UR