Pure anecdote here.
I was Genghis the extremely junior engineer, just out of the Student Engineers Training Centre (SETC) over in the white "H-blocks" that Milt and JF had received their ETPS training next to Queens gate. (I believe that those building are still there, but empty and looking rather sorry for themselves). The establishment had recently changed name from "RAE" to "RAE" although most people hadn't really noticed the change from "Aircraft" to "Aerospace", and ultimately it was RAE and all one big happy family. My first job out of my initial "student apprenticeship" was as assistant to just about everybody in "Base Engineering", which was the department responsible for taking the boffins ideas, and getting them into aircraft and airworthy so that Test Pilots like LOMCEVAK could go and break them.
My job was on Lynx ZD285, which was being used for developing various Heli-tele and FLIR systems. I had a desk in a drawing office next door to it's hangar and spent many happy days crawling underneath it with a steel rule and micrometer, then back and forth to my desk and drawing board as I created various "make to fit" installations for retaining various black boxes, cable arrays and external lamps and sensors in the right place, at the right angle, and designed to take the right flight loads. I recall my supervisor having to remind me several times that gravity didn't just act downwards in a flying machine and the importance being hammered into me of allowing for inertial forces in every direction as I analysed the various bracketry I designed. As a 19 year old, allowed for the first time around flying machines, it was all very exciting - although to this day I'm not sure I've ever actually seen ZD285 airborne, not could I find a picture of it - but here is ZD284 it's sister
I can recall a few other instances from that period. One was being told to take a couple of days away from the drawing board and go and learn a bit about how Southern Squadron handled it's maintenance, I was passed over into the care of a couple of chaps with the introduction "don't tell them any state secrets, they're armourers". These chaps introduced me to the intricacies of ejection seat servicing (a skill I've never used - as clearly indicated by my Hunter anecdote earlier) and explosives safety. They also let me sit in the back of a Hawk one day for a maintenance engine run. Having made quite sure that the back of the aircraft was pointed directly at Western Squadron's tea room, I got shown what not to touch, given a pair of ear defenders and shut in with the fitter I/C in the front seat. The engine started, and as it started the air conditioning kicked in; however it turned out that this particular aircraft had an air filter saturated in moisture, as a result it started snowing in the rear cockpit. Apparently the look of utter horror on my face, just before all visibility of the inside of the cockpit from outside blanked out was extremely funny - although it took me a few minutes and a large mug of sweet tea to fully appreciate the humour of the situation. My next morning's task was learning how to help remove and replace the air filter in a Hawk's air conditioning system.....
Another task I recall learning a great deal from in that job was a little powered parachute microlight called a Powerchute Raider. We had one of these, with a military registration ZG927. This was being used for testing various "flying wing" canopies - on the basis that starting on the ground was a happily low risk way of testing an experimental canopy. It looked something like this...
Anyhow, this beastie was getting through an embarrasingly large number of engine mounting bolts which were routinely going through the propeller - doing it no good whatsoever, and raising serious concerns that sooner later a bit of bolt would come back through the pilot. I was basically given the aircraft, a corner of the hangar, and told to work out what the problem was and how to solve it. That was when I learned to understand and respect boffins - I particularly recall taking some failed bolts over to M&S (Materials and Structures Dept, often referred to as
Marks and Spencers) and tracking down the expert on failed bolts. He took them from me silently, put them under a magnifier and calmly gave me a full run down on how the bolt was mounted, how many cycles it had taken to fail, where the peak stresses where, and even how many weeks it had been sat in the hangar supervisors drawer since it had been removed from the aircraft.
This really was one of the huge strengths of RAE - and Farnborough in particular. There were these incredibly bright chaps who beavered away for 40 years studying often quite obscure subjects. But, the fact is that they became the worlds leading experts in their various subjects - and when called upon could solve a problem of a failed bolt, fit AAR to a Vulcan bomber that was never designed for it, create an airborne radio-range extender for a particular operation, invent carbon fibre, whatever was called for - all in an incredibly short space of time before returning to writing obscure reports about their pet subjects. I really do think that a huge national asset was destroyed when much of this "blue skies" research was curtailed in the name of efficiency and DRA.
(Eventually I came up with a revised design for the engine mount, which changed the loadings and eliminated the fatigue raisers around the bolts. Unfortunately I believe that ZG927 was lost about a year later in an unrelated accident - but by then I was elsewhere and wasn't involved in any subsequent investigations).
G