Upper Second Masters Degree (Honours) (M.Eng) in Mechanical Engineering from Nottingham University. (1989)

I came top in second year design and our third year group design project, a design for a wind powered water pump, won the University's Ford Motor Company Design Prize.

I am Associate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. I am applying for full (Chartered) Membership.

I also have a Master of Business Administration (with Distinction!) collected after three year's part time study at Hull Business School.

I also passed Open University courses in Software Engineering and Mechatronics (Robotics and Artificial Intelligence).

Work Experience

British Aerospace (Military Aircraft Division), Brough, East Yorkshire. October 1989 - November 2000.

A Leading Design Engineer in the Aerodynamic Design Department at British Aerospace Brough where I worked for the eleven years after leaving university. My ultimate role was as the Aerodynamics office representative on various project teams and a Hawk Project role - a 'Cost Account Manager' - leading a team specifying and purchasing an external fuel tank from Canada for the Hawk aircraft we supplied to Canada.

My technical past in the office involved the deriving of loads from wind tunnel and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) for the Aircraft and Stores (pylons, fuel tanks, weapons), and the trajectories of fuel tanks and weapons when they are released from aircraft.
In my spare time, I supported the Brough stores clearance team mainly on the computing side, programming and the use of the specialist stores clearance software.

Early in my BAe career I was the airframe design representative at the flight trials of our development aircraft, responsible for ensuring that the aircraft did not exceed defined loads. This involved liaising with other design staff, the flight test organisation and the test pilots, also for monitoring flight instrument telemetry during the flight and ensuring that design loads were not exceeded. I also wrote flight test data post processing software to take the results from the aircraft, analyse, present and store them.

In late 1993 I represented the company in the Middle East during a five week problem solving exercise. This gave me an excellent opportunity to discover the way our customers - pilots and ground crew - view and use our product.

I developed software methods (in Matlab, Fortran, C and C++) that reduced the design time of an aircraft, putting to good use the knowledge learned in my Open University Software Engineering course. At the end of 1994 I wrote a well-received user guide to a major piece of Military Aircraft Software that had been supplied with an incomprehensible set of instructions, I then supervised the placing of this document on an cross site intranet.

I held the part time position of Quality Co-ordinator within the department for four years and was responsible for ensuring that the department continued to meet the requirements of ISO 9000 (BS 5750). This involved liaising with customer and supplier departments. I was the first winner of the Technical Directorate Quality Award. I was appointed Software Quality Co-ordinator in January 1995 to look specifically at Software Quality issues and was asked to produce a Task Management System for the BAe/Saab Gripen project.
As a British Aerospace ISO 9000 and 9000-3 (software) assessor I led an audit team through the Technical Function at Brough during 1995 examining the whole process from estimating to the Release to Service of the aircraft.

I was also involved in the definition and documentation of the processes and tools, including I.T. requirements that would be needed used for the Gripen project at Brough, interfacing the site to Saab in Sweden. This task foundered through IT funding issues at BAe, and in particular complications of interfacing two completely different National / NATO security standards.

In 1994 I took over the IT management of the office, identifying and specifying the office IT requirements and navigating the incredibly complicated purchase system that BAe had set up with its IT supplier CSC.
From this I graduated to  "IT Project Manager - Aerodynamics Military Aircraft and Aerostructures". In this role I was responsible for managing the IT purchases for the Aerodynamics office across all four of the Military Aircraft sites - supporting all of the aircraft and research projects. Unfortunately my move into the role occurred at almost exactly the same time as the removal of the Aerodynamics budgets, and I spend most of my time saying why we couldn't buy equipment, rather than giving permission. 

In the last three years at BAe most of my time however was spent working with the NFTC Hawk project, acting as the Aerodynamics Office representative - and acting as Cost Account Manager (Project Manager) for the NFTC Centreline Tank - an additional external fuel tank that would be one of the major changes on this Hawk aircraft (the Mk 115).

It was a very useful project for me, giving me an even better overview of the overall aircraft design process than could have been achieved working in any other team on Hawk or Gripen - covering Design, Structures, Flight (Mechanical Systems), Aerodynamics, Project Management, Technical Publications, Ground Equipment, Customer Support, Purchasing and Engineering. Quite an exposure! An early decision in the project was to vendor purchase the tank and I  represented the technical organisation three times at the vendor's premises in Montreal, on two occasions leading a small technical team from BAe, the other time having to do the job all by myself.

However, it was the experience of the centreline tank and impending job cuts on the Hawk project at BAE SYSTEMS, coupled with a fateful episode of Tomorrow's World, that made me apply for voluntary redundancy (I didn't get it and had to resign instead!) and set up my own business instead.

The episode of Tomorrow's World showed an apparently new cleaning system being used to clean boats, this neatly fitted into our family interest in restoring yachts, and also into our family office cleaning business. As I am currently in legal dispute with my franchisor of this 'new' cleaning system, he shall not get the benefit of being mentioned by name on this web page. It can be said though that my company Greenleaf Contractors Ltd are in partnership with three other companies (the Ashrose Group) that continue to offer the same services that we did when all working as franchisees. 

I  also worked for two family companies - the Clean Water Company Ltd. which manufactured water purification systems for the market garden industry and small scale sewage treatment plants, and the Chemical Company Ltd. who are the sole UK importers of GRAF Epoxy resins. In both companies I was involved in designing, manufacturing, installing and commissioning plant. I provide IT support another family company, a contract cleaning franchise.

Interests

Software, Computing and Robotics

I have strong interests in software development. I have programmed in DELPHI, BASIC, FORTRAN, MATLAB, C and C++. I am interested in using computers for basic robotics and simple control applications. I have used my home PC for software development, database development and some robotics. I have produced a yacht restoration club year book, and the user guide for the BAe software. I have constructed various specialist database applications for the family companies.

Boat Restoration

As a family we have a fleet of six sailing yachts, all in various states of disrepair. In 1992 my father and I restored a clinker built 1904 Humber Yawl and took it to a boat festival in France. We also have a 25' 1930 Clyde Canoe Club Yawl and a 30' 1929 yawl. Occasionally we find the time to sail them, mainly on the river Humber.

We have well-equipped wood and metal workshops at home and have constructed several trailers as well as restoring the boats.
 

Clay and Game Shooting
Although disapproved of by my colleagues at British Aerospace, I took up Clay Pigeon and Game (Rough) shooting. I took my dogs beating for many years on a shoot near Scarborough, and after some time of feeling that I could shoot better than many of the guns on the shoot, decided to take some lessons - then join them.