For those of you who visited Goodwood Festival of Speed on Sunday a few weeks back you would have been greeted by an awesome sight. No, not the new McLaren MP4-12C or the Rolls Royce Ghost, but actually a relic from the golden years when ‘can’t’ wasn’t in the vocabulary of the British engineer. It was the Avro Vulcan, or Vulcan Bomber as it is commonly known. A machine so advance that it was our nuclear deterrent during the Cold War and saw service during the war in the Falklands.
What makes this machine so outstanding was that it pretty much was a first for so many technologies. The fact that the delta wing design and the engines went onto form, what became, the most advance passenger aircraft ever, Concorde. It was a very humbling experience to stand beneath this plane as it roared through the sky above Goodwood.
It got me thinking on the abilities of our country and the skills we once had. However I was buoyed by a new program on Sunday evenings straight after Top Gear which looks at key pieces of technology we have developed in Britain. By far the most interesting was the one on Rolls-Royce which detailed the building and design of their Trent jet engines. For us British, Rolls-Royce appears to be a sizable global company, but in reality I hadn’t realised how fragile and small it is compared to its competitors such as General Electric.
We have the abilities in this country to engineer some incredible technology, lets hope there is more to come and Britian isn’t only known for wacky vacuum cleaners.
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