Quicksand Fans

I regret to announce the passing at the age of 97 of Wing-Commander Kenneth Wallis.

The name may not be familiar to you, but 99% of you will have seen him. He is the man who designed, built and flew (as Sean Connery's stunt double) the autogyro in the Bond Film You Only Live Twice.

Despite not having a single engineering qualification ("I rely on common sense and the bloody obvious") he was tinkering with engines from a young age. His father and uncle built and flew (and crashed) one of the first aeroplanes constructed in England in the early 1900's. In a pleasing parallel to the Wright brothers, Wallis snr ran a bicycle and motorcycle shop. Wallis jnr built his first motorcycle at the age of eleven.

By dint of cheating his way through the medical (he was almost blind in one eye) Wallis joined the RAF and served in bomber command during WW2 - where he earned the nickname "Crasher." He lost three bombers, though none to enemy action (lightning, fog, and the cable of a barrage balloon were his nemeses). Between missions he amused himself by building toy cars with electric motors which ran around a slotted track, thus anticipating Scalectric by a couple of decades ("My version was more realistic.")

He spent a couple of years on secondment to the USAF, when he flew a B26 with a nuclear payload over the North Pole. Whilst over there, he also built powerboats out of scrap, which he entered in races and won.

From 1959 he developed the autogyro. Though this project never took off (commercially) as he had hoped, he did impress Cubby Broccoli who hired him on the spot. Whilst on location in Japan, he was mortified to be ordered to shave off his moustache - and rather put out to learn that the Japanese pilot of the camera heliocopter had originally trained as a Kamikaze ("Though he turned out to be a very nice chap.")

He and his autogyros were familiar sights at airshows, and he set numerous records. He flew the length of Britain ("I had to stop - I'd run out of land.") and once ascended to 18,976 feet without oxygen. At the age of 81 he "accidentally" set a record for the fastest ascent; and eight years later rather more deliberately set a world speed record (at the age of 94 he was furious when the Civil Aviation Authority refused him permission to attempt to break this record). Flying an autogyro was not without hazards. At the age of 90 a freak cross-wind caused him to crash. He walked away from the wreck, remarking "Embarrassing - but as crash-landings go, it was textbook."

He also participated in (fruitless) searches for the Loch Ness Monster and Lord Lucan, designed the bomb-loading system of Britain's first jet bomber, and advised the makers of Concorde on how to reduce engine noise.

In short, he was a truly great lunatic. The world needs more like him.

Not only a long life but a full one. Godspeed......

What an awesome individual! We need more people like him.

"I rely on common sense and the bloody obvious."

I like that. That's the sort of thing I wish there was more of in this world. Perhaps the people who need this more than anyone else are many of the 'engineers' I've seen. Don't get me wrong. I've seen engineers who do great work. However, there's no one who can completely and totally screw things up like an incompetent engineer, especially one who thinks he knows everything.

About a decade ago in my home town, there was a major project to pave and upgrade many of the streets. One street was to be raised a few inches on a certain block. The homeowners on that block recognized that rainwater flowed through the alley behind their homes and out onto that street, where it then drained into a retention pond a few blocks away. They told the engineers on the project that, if the street were raised, it would act like a dam and rainwater would back up into their yards and homes.

The response from the engineers was they were engineers and they knew what they were doing.

So, the street was raised. Guess what happened at the first rain storm? That's right, the homes were flooded. One fellow had a couple of inches of water in his garage. Another had his pool basically destroyed. It cost the town a large amount of money to pay for the damage and to rework the drainage. It could all have been avoided if the engineers and designers had listened to the residents in the first place.

Engineers with good sense. What a novel concept! You know, it might just work!

- Big Bad John

P.S. I sometimes wonder if similar engineers were responsible for Yahoo's recent 'upgrades.'

The secret to creating an engineer is feeding them Lego sets when they're kids. I work with several PE's and am/know a lot of mechanically apt people--we all share that one common bond lol.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA