Working at the Handley Page company, and then in the guided weapons division of the Bristol Aeroplane Company (now part of BAE Systems), in the 1950s and 60s, the engineer and aerodynamicist Ron Ayers, who has died aged 92, became one of Britain’s most experienced supersonic and high-speed aircraft designers.
Following retirement in 1988, he took on a volunteer role at the Brooklands Museum, Weybridge, and was fascinated to discover, among the aviation archives held there, aerodynamic and wind tunnel work on the prewar generation of land-speed record-breaking cars. This led to Ayers meeting Ken Norris, designer (with his brother Lew) of Donald Campbell’s Bluebird car and jet-powered boat. With these two vehicles, in 1964, Campbell had achieved world records, for land speed of 403.1mph (648.73 km/h), and for water speed of 276.3mph (444.71km/h).
Norris had also been manager of more recent world-record-breaking runs by the self-styled “adventurer and engineer” Richard Noble with Thrust, a car that gained a world record of 633mph (1018.7 km/h) in the Nevada desert in 1983. When Ayers bumped into Noble by chance, while they were both passing through Bournemouth airport in 1992, he found that Noble’s next project was the Thrust SSC, a jet-powered “car” intended to break the sound barrier on land – at a speed of about 767mph. “Don’t be an idiot – you’ll kill yourself,” Ayers said.
The problem is that a land-speed car is an “interface vehicle” running between air and earth. Designing a stable supersonic shape for that regime is quite different to making an aircraft or missile that could achieve supersonic flight safely in free air. On land, where would the supersonic shock waves around the vehicle go and how might they upset it? What would the airflow underneath it be like and how might it lift or destabilise it? There were no precedents. But, intrigued by the challenge, Ayers mulled over the problem and, a little later, got back to Noble saying that he thought he could see a way to do it.
There are no wind tunnels capable of modelling this situation, but between them, they called in favours and all their contacts to win time for day-long simulations that ran on Britain’s most powerful supercomputer (a Cray machine), in parallel with physical experiments with a scale model attached to an 800mph rail-mounted rocket sledge at the Defence Research Agency’s establishment at MOD Pendine in Wales.
The research paid off, and on 15 October 1997 the RAF pilot Wg Cmdr Andy Green finally achieved a supersonic world record of 763.035mph (1,227.986 km/h) in Thrust SSC – a record that still stands.
Ayers was born in London, the son of Frederick Ayers, an engineer, and his wife, Maud (nee Jardine). To escape bombing during the second world war, in 1940 the family, and Frederick’s factory, moved to Barnstaple in Devon. Deemed not suitable for university, due to chronic childhood ear infections (alleviated with the advent of penicillin) and an interrupted education, Ron went straight into the Handley Page company in 1950 as an engineering apprentice, where he worked on the Victor bomber project. This also allowed him “day release” to gain a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of London. He then won a scholarship to study for an MSc at Cranfield College of Aeronautics (now Cranfield University).
Britain had some of the most technically advanced aircraft companies in the world and Handley Page was one of the most esteemed, at the forefront with an exceptionally advanced aerodynamic design team. Its Victor bomber became central to the V force – Britain’s cold war deterrent. These aircraft had been devised to evade interception by flying faster and higher than any aircraft before.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of aerodynamic science to national policy at the time. Cold war aircraft development was a contest of the brightest minds to achieve unprecedented performance in the tricky transonic regime – the speed range approaching the speed of sound. As the new postwar generation of military aircraft approached that speed, the airflow over them could be mixed – flowing in a familiar, well understood way in some areas, but becoming supersonic over parts where the air accelerated.
This supersonic (incompressible) flow was a new, little studied, phenomenon, and it posed fresh problems in stability, control and structural integrity. The whole industry was supported closely by the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire (and at Bedford). This was probably the biggest research enterprise in Europe in those years.
This was the milieu in which Ayers developed – solving problems that the feasibility of Noble’s supersonic car would recall. The national deterrent policy back then was to devise near-supersonic bombers that could outfly the fighter defences, exploiting speed, height and the limitations imposed by radar warning time. But at the same time, the aim was to create home defences that could catch anything similar developed by an enemy.
As part of this war of innovation, the Bristol company was developing the Bloodhound guided missile, intended to destroy incoming enemy aircraft, so it is intriguing that Ayers in 1956 joined the Bristol’s guided weapons division, becoming chief aerodynamicist. The revised Bloodhound Mk II that he worked on was a highly effective missile intended to destroy bombers attacking Britain, capable of reaching 65,000ft (nearly 20,000 metres) at more than twice the speed of sound. It went into service “to defend the deterrent” – the V-bomber force that Ayers had originally contributed to in his first job.
However, on the death of his father, Ayers left aeronautics and in 1967 took over the family business, which made printing presses, remaining with the company until it was sold in 1988.
In retirement, as well as volunteering at Brooklands, Ayers was actively involved in promoting engineering education, and he viewed the Thrust SSC record-breaking attempts as valuable publicity to showcase engineering and its intrinsic interest. Subsequently, he was chief aerodynamicist for the JCB 2006 Dieselmax car, which still holds the world diesel car record of over 350mph (560 km/h), and also for the projected 1,000mph Bloodhound car.
All this highly original work done in the later decades of Ayers’s life was, he said, “much more fun than mowing the lawn”.
Ayers married Irene Graham, a psychologist, in 1968. She died in 1991 and he is survived by their son, Roger, and granddaughters, Lily-May and Daisy.
• Ronald Frederick Ayers, engineer, born 11 April 1932; died 29 May 2024
