I used to chair the Royal Aeronautical Society branch somewhere close to a lot of F1 teams. We had a lot of aeronautical engineers turn up to meetings, who were working full time in F1.
There's an interesting point here about perceptions and role models. When I was a boy, there were role models of sorts - Heinz Wolff in the Great Egg Race (who was directly responsible for me becoming an engineer after he came and gave a talk at my school and I then went to talk to him). Werner von Braun was towards the end of his career, but we all knew about what he'd done. There was a consciousness of the "Boffins" who had developed and built all the magnificent machines that won WW2 in our parents generations. Many movies had had engineers as prominent roles for many years (James Stewart in No Highway, numerous Quatermas movies, portrayals of RJ Mitchell and Barnes Wallis in First of the Few and The Dam Busters). We even had a credible 'Q' in the James Bond movies before we got the current comedy act by Basil Fawlty. Nevil Shute's novels, a large number of which featured engineers as heroes, were mainstream.
Where are those role models now? Circa 1999 I worked for Scrapheap Challenge for an episode, and that worked well - but watch it now and it's moved increasingly away from engineering and towards popular entertainment, do any of us know who the prominent Engineers were in creating Typhoon?, A380? - the only major engineer I can think of in the public eye is James Dyson: but when do you hear him asking about engineering?
A lot of this does seem, I think, to be down to the media. I "play" with the media a bit, mostly the BBC and for example did a few appearances to explain what had happened after the Quantus A380 engine failure. On this occasion just about everything they wanted to ask me questions about was all about the economics: Rolls Royce's share prices and the like. Is it really that uninteresting to discuss how a jet engine works and can fail? (That said, briefings I put together on some previous interesting prangs, and especially on volcanic ash did get widely used.)
Print media is the same - apart from a few "geeky" gadget features, the newspapers don't talk about "miracles of engineering" in the way that I seem to remember from my youth (Eagle?, Insight?...) Mainstream novels often have medics and scientists, but not engineers.
So, the problem is, I think, a world (and in particular the media) that despite relying upon engineering utterly, seems to have come to find it really uninteresting.
If we as a profession are going to do something about this, we each of us need to do something active. Sandy clearly is, and well done. Now, here's a challenge to all of us?
- Next time there's an engineering related story in the media that you have the professional knowledge - can you do anything to help explain it? Short piece for the local paper?, phone your local radio station and offer to be interviewed?
- Got kids? Live near a school? Have you ever offered to go and give a talk about careers in engineering?
- Anything else YOU can do to tell the world that engineering is not just important, but damned good fun and a great career.
G