Originally Posted by
India Four Two
A really good book, which I have read twice. I didn't notice any technical issues with it but a lot of great anecdotes in it,
He describes the shocked reaction of the RR staff, when Packard engineers tell them that the Merlin drawings will have to be redone, because they are not accurate enough!
He also complimented his Chinese hosts, in the 1970s, on their copy of the Russian copy of the Nene and pointed out they had faithfully copied RR's mistakes.
It was Ford in the UK, not Packard, and Stanley himself thought they would say the tolerances were too tight, not the opposite. To be fair, at that time he wasn't really an engineer at all, let alone not much of one and assumed RR were the bee's knees.
I've always suspected that Packard used Ford's revised drawings rather than RR's although I've no grounds for it, it just seems logical.
Although I'm a huge fan of Brunel, I could probably be persuaded to give Sir Stanley the accolade and I think it's a shame that most people have never heard of him, even amongst aircraft enthusiasts.