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Alan Brown Interview by Peter Westwick, 15 November 2010

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Alan Brown Interview by Peter Westwick, 15 November 2010 Alan Brown interview by Peter Westwick, 15 November 2010. WESTWICK: We're here with Alan Brown on November 15th, 2010 in his home in Watsonville, California. Probably the best way to get started is just briefly to go back to the beginning, as it were. You're from England originally. You mentioned you started in the industry in 1945, but how did you get to that point? BROWN: I was born in 1929. By the time I was about eight years old it was 1938 in England, and war was imminent, and that was pretty much known to everybody; Hitler had invaded Czechoslovakia. All the kids in that age were airplane nuts. Everybody I knew, we'd all go around going r-r-r, like that. I think that even by the time I was eight years old, rather surprisingly, I knew I wanted to be an airplane designer. WESTWICK: Not a pilot but a designer? BROWN: No, I never really had a strong interest in wanting to fly these airplanes, but I certainly was very interested in designing and building them. My father was a good engineering type, and he started me off building model airplanes probably when I was about six. WESTWICK: This was with balsa wood and rubber bands? BROWN: Yeah, balsa wood, rubber-band powered airplanes. We would fly them in the field behind our house. So I had parental interest in it, which influenced me. My friend across the street and I were both airplane crazy, it turned out. During the war, which was 1939 to 1945, of course, for the Brits, our hobby was getting on our bicycles on weekends and riding out to local Royal Air Force airfields, and hiding behind the hedges, watching for airplanes, and writing the registration numbers down in our little books, and stuff like that. WESTWICK: Now, where were you in England? BROWN, ALAN BROWN: This was near Newcastle-on-Tyne. I was within about a mile of the North Sea coast. So we got bombed, because Newcastle was a fairly prominent shipbuilding and armaments building area. The German bombers tended to drop their bombs on the coastline if they couldn't penetrate the defenses, so we had our little share of damage to our house and so on. As kids we would go out collecting bits of German airplanes or antiaircraft gun souvenirs, like all kids do during wartime. Then we used to go exploring the local airfields and looking for new airplanes, and writing down when we saw a new model Spitfire or Hawker Typhoon or whatever. So we were just in that mode. First of all, I should say that in England at that time the high school graduation system was different from what it is here. We graduated from high school at the age of 16. If you wanted to go on to college, you would usually stay on at high school in what was called the upper and lower sixth forms, which were definitely college preparatory. In combination this was similar to about first year in a junior college here, which is why bachelor's degrees in England, at least at that time, were three-year programs rather than the four they are here. I in fact elected to leave school at 16 with the normal high school finishing certificate and went to do an apprenticeship at Blackburn Aircraft, which was the nearest airplane company, about 120 miles south of where I lived. That was in Yorkshire. My friend across the street went down to London and he worked as an apprentice for Handley Page. So in other words, the two of us were both interested in this. Another friend down the street from us went in locally as a shipbuilding apprentice, because Newcastle was a big shipbuilding area at that time. So it was very typical that the kids there were engineering inclined. There seemed to be quite a few of us. Probably a lot of it was just the result of being brought up during a world war when there's a lot of engineering activity going on. Anyway, I spent five years at Blackburn Aircraft and finished there when I was 20. Then a friend of mine, another apprentice that I was with, suggested that I go on to Cranfield. Two or three of us were going to go on to Cranfield University to do what was then the equivalent of a master's degree. I did that from 1950 to '52, so by the time I was 22 years old, I had a master's. The apprenticeship that we did at Blackburn Aircraft was sort of a combination thing. It was really pretty interesting, and it stood me, I think, in very good stead because I knew the front end 2 BROWN, ALAN of an airplane from the back, which contrasted with a lot of university students that I would get later in America: new entries at Lockheed who knew the math and knew the engineering in principle but never really had touched an airplane. So that was sort of an interesting start. I did two years working in eight different shops in the company, like woodworking, metalworking, final assembly, machine shop, stuff like that. At the same time I went to two years of evening classes, and then two and a half years full time at the local technical college to get what was called a higher national diploma in engineering. WESTWICK: This is the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. BROWN: Equivalent to a bachelor's, except there was no what I call social studies. I mean there was no English, history, geography, or stuff like that. It was strictly an engineering tech school. Then I went back to Blackburn Aircraft for the last six months of my apprenticeship, where we did three months in the structures design department and three months in the aerodynamics department. WESTWICK: Was this a government program? BROWN: No. It was run by individual companies. WESTWICK: So Blackburn was paying for your education? BROWN: Yes. When I worked for Blackburn Aircraft as an apprentice, it started off you get paid according to your age. At 15 years old I was paid 15 shillings a week, which is three- quarters of a pound—which is why I never took up smoking, because cigarettes were about a day's pay. [laughter] All of the different aircraft companies had apprenticeship programs at that time. That was a very standard way of doing things. A five-year apprenticeship included the equivalent of getting a bachelor's degree. It's almost like a lot of the work-study programs in this country, where you stretch a bachelor's degree out for five years and intermittently work with a 3 BROWN, ALAN company, except that here the whole five years was a company-sponsored kind of thing. Then I went on to do a two-year diploma at the college of aeronautics at Cranfield, which was later sort of renamed as a master's degree because people didn't understand what that diploma meant. But it was essentially a master's, so by 1952, when I was 22 years old, I had an MS and went to work at Bristol Aeroplane Company in the southwest of England. I stayed there for about four years. One of the reasons that I went there particularly is that Britain in that period, 1952, still had national service. If you went into one of the industries that was doing military work, then you were exempt; that was equivalent to doing national service. So I went and worked in what was called the guided weapons department at Bristol Aeroplane Company for four years. When you were 26, then that national service thing expires, so you're then free to do what you like. One of the things I'd always wanted to do was to get more into aeronautical research. In Britain, although the quality of research was very good, the difficulty of getting into it was quite significant. The people who were doing it were the National Physical Laboratory and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and for both of them it was fairly narrow as far as being able to get into those areas. The individual companies did not usually have research departments—they relied on the two major government areas that I just mentioned—whereas American companies all tended to have their own research. I thought that would be neat to do that, so I wrote off to about seven different companies in California and came up 0 for 7 as far as them wanting to hire me. I found out the reason for that was that about four years previously had been the height of what was called the brain drain, when a lot of engineers and people came over from Europe to America. Then the American companies found that when they tried to put them to work, as they weren't citizens and didn't have any kind of security clearances, they'd often spend a lot of time just paying them to play bridge and chess waiting for their clearances to come through. By the time I signed up they decided this was a bad idea. So that didn't work out, but a friend of mine who had also been at Cranfield was working for Aerojet in Southern California in Azusa, and they were having the University of Southern California do a lot of their wind tunnel work. He said, "They have a pretty good little research group at USC.
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