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Aviation History
1979
1979 - 0034.PDF
32 FLIGHT International, 6 January 1979 Joseph Szydlowski 80 Joseph Szydlowski, France's illustrious designer and builder of light turbines, and as active as ever as head of his company Turbomeca, typifies the many great sons of French aviation THE personality who contributed most to my attach ment to aeronautics was the late Albert Caquot, then director-general of French aeronautics. It was Albert Caquot who said to me: "Make aircraft fly higher than those of the Germans and we will win the war." The greatest satisfaction of my aeronautical career was to see flying the first glider in the world propelled by a small turbine developed by myself and on my own initia tive. That presentation was achieved at Miami in 1950, with Marcel Doret and Fred Nicholl in charge. After the demonstration, which was successful and well received, my friend Frank Nicolas Piasecki pushed me onto the platform to make a little speech in public. At that time I had not spoken English for 30 years, and I do not know how I acquitted myself. But I gathered that Americans are very polite because they all applauded. I send Flight my sincere greetings. Joseph Szydlowski (right) with Igor Sikorsky after the 1953 first flight of the S-52-5, the first helicopter to fly with a turbine (Turbomeca Artouste) Sir George Edwards 70 Sir George Edwards—Viking, Valetta, Varsity, Viscount, Valiant, Vanguard, VC10, One-Eleven, TSR.2, Concorde, Jaguar and Tornado were some of the types for which he had chief-designer or ultimate British technical responsibility You have asked me who my heroes were. When I helped Dennis Richards with his important book Portal of Hungerford I did so because Lord Portal was one of my three national heroes. The other two, who have nothing to do with aeroplanes, are Horatio Nelson and Isambard Kingdom Brunei. If you are confining "heroism" to people that I knew personally and worked with and learned things from, then obviously I knew neither Nelson nor Brunei. But I certainly knew Portal. The three of them seem to have had a fair amount in common. Nelson is one of my heroes because of the change of attitude that he brought about in the handling of people. Everything you read about Nelson—and I've read I don't know how many books about him—indicate to me that he had the ability to get people to do things far beyond what they thought they were capable of doing. The methods he used were pretty well known. Discipline was necessary, because you couldn't run a ship without it; but he reckoned also that you had to be just. Nelson also felt that the right process—which now gets put into a lot of management jargon—was to let his captains (a) know what he was doing, (b) have a say in it and (c) have authority to go off and to do something on their own if they thought the situation needed individual action. Nelson introduced all these things—certainly for the first time in the Royal Navy. The accounts of the meetings before the Battle of Trafalgar, of the consultations with his captains—of the way he brought them into the picture and gave them freedom of action—is to me a pretty interesting example of what in modern times is taught as a brave new invention in communications and delegation, and all that. Brunei was somewhat different from Nelson. He too had the ability to make people push themselves well beyond what they thought they were capable of doing. He wasn't as good an organiser as Nelson. But he had the same ruthless driving of himself. There was never any thought of his personal comfort. He and Nelson both in effect killed themselves quite early, by pushing themselves regardless of their own wellbeing to do the job in hand. I have always had a great admiration for both these chaps. Then I got to know Lord Portal. I'd always reckoned from what I knew of the conduct of the Second World War that he was really the greatest of the commanders, though he was the least publicised. He was modest to the point of being diffident. I'd known him from afar when he was in Bomber Command and I was a pretty small cog in the great manufacturing machinery. But then when BAC was Left Porta/ as chief of the air staff during the Second World War. Right Comm
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