COMBAT AND COMPETITION.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

COMBAT AND COMPETITION
board on matters relating to Government and MoS contracts.
Jack was General Manager of British Oxygen Aro Equipment,
BOAE, a newly created subsidiary of BOC to promote Aro Corporation
products manufactured under licence elsewhere in the group, and I
was to be his Sales Manager.
The three of us shared an office, in the BOC Headquarters
Building opposite St James's Palace, and it could be said that the two
junior officers treated their colleague with the respect due to his rank!
We would have done so in any case, for we respected the man himself
every bit as much, but it was also a sensible precaution because our
AVM had a short fuse. Fortunately his explosions were relatively
infrequent and they were usually reserved for the greater absurdities
of those he dealt with in Government or on the BOC Board.
It was the mixture much as before, if in simpler engineering terms.
Arguing the case for spherical liquid oxygen converters, in place of
high pressure storage cylinders, on all the projects which I had been
pushing for Elliotts. There was an obvious need to define a minimum
range of standard converter capacities, the quantities in which these
might be required, and the manufacturing programme requirements.
Allowances had to be made for the possibility of retrofits on aircraft
already in service, or on those, which were already well advanced in
production.
The MoS were supporting BOAE with an Aro derived stainless
steel design, and Normalair with a plated copper converter, in a typical
dual sourcing exercise. Yet they could provide virtually no guidance
about the likely size of the combined RAF/RN market over the
following 5 years. In the end it became a matter of gathering
information from a number of sources and making my own
projections. Even allowing something extra - for a reasonable share of
the demand oxygen regulator market - in competition with a
Normalair/Drager design - the results looked pretty thin.
Nevertheless we had high hopes for the lox converter. It was
lighter, and safer, than the high pressure cylinders which it would be
replacing. And the Aro stainless steel design seemed to be more
promising in the long run than the Normalair unit. The main problems
were in engineering and manufacture - to achieve the welding
standards needed for a consistently hard vacuum, and effective
insulation, between the inner and outer shells*
There was a brief look at liquid nitrogen converters as well for fuel
tank purging and explosion suppression on the three V bombers. This
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