Leonardo – On Polymaths – February 2020
I was fortunate enough to visit both the exhibitions in the National Gallery, London in January and the Louvre, Paris in February on Leonardo Da Vinci.
The exhibitions were part of commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death.
Both were very different in their staging and approach – but taken together they give a powerful insight into one of the world’s most celebrated polymaths.
The National Gallery exhibition, “The making of a masterpiece”, was centred on the creation of both versions of “The Virgin of the Rocks”, culminating in a face-to-face encounter with the second version of the painting (part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection) in a virtual altarpiece.
In the first of a series of rooms, the visitor is shown the landscape of the Dolomites in northern Italy which forms the setting of the painting, interspersed with quotes from Leonardo on the transience of human life and experience – and his belief that the task of the artist was to try and capture the essence of a moment in space and time for eternity.
The concept of an image as not only recording a point in time but actually embodying it was also explored at the dawn of photography (the Fox Talbot museum in Lacock has an excellent exhibition on this) It is also reminiscent of concepts in Catholic theology – such as the Eucharist being connected to the actual moment of Christ’s sacrifice in death and the Last Supper.
From there, a room follows which shows the equipment used by conservators and researchers in studying historic paintings, alongside an audiovisual display describing the materials used in the painting and showing a comparison between the two versions.
The third – and probably the most intriguing room, teaches the concept of chiarascuoro – the use of light and shadow to convey depth and realism to a 2D painting. The central display in the room is a 3D image of a model posed in the position and clothing of the Virgin Mary in the Virgin of the Rocks. A control panel allows visitors to change the position of a light source illuminating the image, showing how the choice of lighting angle changes the focus of our attention and even appears to change the expression on the face of woman – even though it is always the same image we are lighting.
From there, we walk through a room depicting the layout of the sidechapel and church in which the altarpiece (the original commisioned setting of the painting) was to be installed – before finally approaching the painting itself.
From studying altarpieces made by sculptors and artists that Leonardo worked with and that were included in the commission, several versions of altarpieces have been virtually mocked up – the painting is located at the centre of them and the display cycles through them before disappearing to allow the visitors to approach the masterpiece on its own.
The exhibition at the Louvre was very different. As was reported in many reviews, it took ten years and a number of political crises to realise an exhibition which was hailed as being the most complete retrospective of Leonardo’s work ever assembled. It included loans from the Vatican and the Queen amongst others – and for part of the exhibition’s run included the original sketch of the Vitruvian man.
The first room, “Light, Shade and Relief” is focused on Leonardo’s apprenticeship to Andrea Del Verocchio. It includes a series of sketches of folds in material and different aspects of human figures around a bronze sculpture of Christ and St Thomas by Del Verocchio. The lighting of the sculpture is significant – demonstrating how the garment folds and the figures’ poses are emphasised by the angle of the light.
Subsequent rooms go through themes on Freedom, Science, Life and his sojourns in various locations (Milan, Florence, France) each beginning with a short introductory panel.
As we proceed through, we are shown work by contemporary artists who influenced Leonardo – a portrait by Antonello Da Messina is seen next to “La Belle Ferroniere” showing how the lustre and expressiveness of the eyes is introduced and makes the sitter more alive.
The first version of the Virgin of the Rocks is in the same room, on the wall opposite a painting of St Jerome.
We then move to a room containing a vast display of pages from Leonardo’s notebooks. These cover a wide variety of subjects, from mathematical treatises on squaring the circle and doubling the cube – to a study on optics in which Leonardo tries to resolve the problem he has realised – that the human eye will see the world upside down!
There are the notebooks we might expect, on the natural world – including rocks, plants and animals and on human anatomy. In fluid mechanics he explores the flightpaths of birds as we might expect given his interest in flying machines – however he also made sketches of pipe flows.
From there we move into rooms that show his later paintings, including Christ with the Virgin and St Anne, his depiction of St John the Baptist and La Scapigliata.
By placing the scientific notebooks at the centre of the journey through the paintings – the curator has underlined a hypothesis similar to that glimpsed at the National Gallery exhibition.
In the Western world – particularly in English speaking countries, there is a perception of a divide between people who are artists, or creative – and people who work and research in STEM subjects. This division has always seemed to me to be somewhat artificial – most scientists, engineers and mathematicians I know also have hobbies and outside interests in music, art, performance or a combination of all of these. Similarly, the arts graduates I know often have an interest in science and the physical processes that govern the world.
For a true polymath like Leonardo there is no difference or division between art and science – both are his means of understanding the workings of the universe. His art is about representing reality and capturing the essence of human experience and the natural world as much as it is about beauty.
Indeed beauty itself is part of his understanding of the universe – and this is no surprise – how often do mathematicians also describe the solution of difficult problems as having elegance and beauty?
This is perhaps why his paintings and his work still have such a fascination for people today. The realism of his paintings and the prescience of his inventions and observations make him seem like a man outside his time.
As a child I wrote a short story which depicted Leonardo Da Vinci as a time traveller – whose inventions were influenced by the machines he’d seen in the future. I think what I recognised then was that in trying to understand the universe beyond the limitations of current knowledge, his dreams glimpsed the potential of what humanity could eventually achieve.
Day 1 of Furlough – 01/06/2020
I suppose my experience of lockdown has not been an entirely typical one.
It began before the official start of the lockdown – we were told to work from home wherever possible and separated into red and blue shifts that could only enter the site at specific times and on specific days. So I spent most of that week working from home – with one day in the office that I used as an opportunity to collect peripherals and personal items I wanted to bring home. By the end of the week the schools were closed and partway through the following week the full lockdown was implemented.
The first two weeks I spent working from home, moving around the house as first my sons, then my husband all joined me and we iterated on the best solution for home school and work. We’re fortunate that we have stable broadband, plenty of technology and devices and a house with enough space for us all to work comfortably without getting in each other’s way.
Conference calls and talking to remote colleagues is normal for me, as I am an aerospace engineer and I have colleagues based in France, Germany, Spain and India that I’m in daily contact with. It was harder not having the normal contact of seeing people face-to-face in the local office – not being able to turn to your neighbour for a chat or meet spontaneously in the kitchen.
There was also the underlying tension and unease that everyone felt. This was partly due to the growing reality of the virus – initially most visible for our Spanish colleagues but then gradually making its presence felt for the rest of us. Everyone’s messages and meetings were signed off with exhortations to “Stay safe” and wishing each other good health.
It was also due to the effect on our industry. Those of us who’ve been around for a while have seen difficult times in the past. During my own career I’ve seen the impact of 9/11, the aftermath of the crisis during the delayed entry into service of A380 and the more generalised impact of the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 financial crisis. Yet none of these could quite prepare any of us for the enormity of the current situation. Every communication from the managers began “these are unprecedented times” and they were right – we’ve gone from a fleet of over 20000 aircraft flying to around 7000 – and even these are carrying out far fewer flights per day than in normal service.
For those of us working in research the effect was particularly unsettling. The difficult balancing act of deciding what to cut in order to survive – but what is needed to prepare for the future, meant rapid requests for different scenarios – some that were inescapably bleak – and renewed justification for plans.
In the midst of this, I was asked to take on a new, temporary mission. To support a wind tunnel test, still planned in the Filton Low Speed Wind Tunnel for an external client.
This meant working through the Easter shutdown as part of a skeleton team and also working on site. The reason for this was twofold- tunnel computers are isolated from the main network and part of test support is inspection and physical checking of the model between runs and configuration changes.
So, for the next six weeks, I got up at 5 to begin work at the tunnel at 6am on the morning shift.
Cycling at 5.30 was cold and exhilarating. Over the course of the weeks the sunrise grew earlier, so at the beginning I was cycling in darkness with my lights on and by the end the sun was fully up and everything was visible.
I would see birds, the occasional surprised looking fox and a few prowling cats.
Only once did I see one of the many rabbits that lives on site – although from memory they tend to appear more in the evenings.
The shift end was at 12:45 with a strict deadline to have left the building within fifteen minutes to prevent any overlap with the afternoon shift.
Whilst at the tunnel, we had to maintain social distancing and saw the many provisions that were being made around the site to enable this. Corridors and stairs marked with one-way systems and 2m markers, closure of on-site canteens and coffee shops. Increased frequency of cleaning.
Some sinks and toilets taped off to ensure that 2m separation could be maintained.
In the afternoon, I had a longer lunch break than normal to allow for the fact that I’d travelled home and had already worked 6.75 hours. I would catch up with my husband and sons – sometimes giving my younger son some guidance or help for his afternoon’s homeschool activities as my husband had already covered the morning.
I would then be plunged into afternoon meetings on my normal job and a daily afternoon call on the wind tunnel test to summarise the day’s progress and agree on the following day’s running order.
In the evening we would usually try to have a family walk or sometimes a cycle to get some fresh air and exercise before dinner.
Wind tunnel testing is always an adventure. There are always problems that have to be resolved, with the model, with the instrumentation, decisions to be made about how to fix the issues and any changes that need to be made to the test runs. You need to check the results – ensure they are of good quality and taken at the correct conditions. You need to do some initial analysis – trying to understand the flow physics – see if the results make sense in the context of what you’re trying to assess.
Here we also had the challenge of ensuring that the decisions made were agreed between the team on site in Filton and the rest of the team and external customers who were following the test remotely from Toulouse. On top of that – the separation of the morning and afternoon shift meant that we couldn’t talk face-to-face with our colleagues to explain investigations and recommendations.
The first few weeks felt interminably long – as each day seemed the same frustrating grind of working through different issues only to discover new ones. However, slowly but surely each problem was resolved and each conflict solved.
Eventually everything came together and we began testing productively – working steadily through the agreed test matrix. The mornings began to whizz past. The afternoon calls were energised, focused.
Finally, we came to the end of the order – the test was complete!
The Test Closure review was held and final inspections made – and then the dismantling of the model began. I reverted to working from home for the last few days of the week.
Those remaining days were dominated by reviewing deliverables and planning for my forthcoming absence with colleagues in other countries who will cover for me.
From a state of high productivity – I’ve now entered a three week period of furlough, followed by two weeks of deferred holiday from having worked during the Easter shutdown.
During July I will have another three weeks of furlough.
This will be the longest period of time that I haven’t been at work since I went on maternity leave with my younger son 11 years ago.
A few people have asked me what I have planned. I’ve answered weakly, “I’ll try and do some writing” although I’m struggling to think of a plot for my great pandemic novel.
My younger son will return part time to school this week so I’ll cover the drop-offs and pick-ups and support him on the days when he’s not onsite at school.
Hopefully I’ll spend some more time exercising.
I’ve done a bit of baking at the weekends so I’ll probably continue that more regularly.
It’s an odd feeling. To know that you’re on a job retention scheme. To be forbidden to do any paid work for your employer – but know that you could be called back with 24 hours notice if the occasion demanded it.
At the beginning of the school closure, my younger son stated “Neither you or Daddy do important jobs, do you?” before checking himself slightly to add “I mean to do with fighting Covid-19”.
He is right, of course. Yet up until last week I was still incredibly busy – even in the midst of chronic uncertainty.
We have our health and we have each other – and I am incredibly thankful for that.
I just wish that the life I had before was a bit closer to returning – even if it will never quite be the same.
Testing Times – 02/06/2020
Like thousands of people all over the world, I was enthralled following the launch of NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken in the SpaceX Dragon capsule and their journey to the ISS.
There was the excitement, anticipation and edge of anxiety prior to lift-off. I was at primary school when the Shuttle Challenger exploded – a stark reminder that space flight is never without risk, particularly during launch. The knowledge that this was the first flight of the rocket and capsule with humans onboard, rather than a crash test dummy – was at the back of my mind. We had arranged a Zoom party with some friends and encouraged the children to watch with us – but I knew there was an outside possibility that we could end up traumatising them with the sight of a fireball rather than witnessing a triumphant historic moment of human endeavour.
Yet arguably one of the more surprising elements of spaceflight is how safe it actually is. Until the weekend’s Dragon mission, the crew for the ISS had spent the last nine years travelling exclusively on Russian Soyuz craft. The Soyuz has changed little in 5 decades and yet is still astonishingly safe – in the last 12 months, it’s capsule abort system was put into action, safely ejecting astronauts from an exploding rocket during an unusual launch failure.
Falcon 9 and Dragon combine the lessons learnt from the past with the technology of the present – and the system had been safely tested without incident with an instrumented dummy – so the risk seemed worth taking.
I’ve never been at the launch of a rocket, or worked in mission control. However, I have sat in the telemetry room of many test flights for commercial aircraft. Admittedly, never for a first flight – but for some early flights where the crew still wore crash helmets and orange jumpsuits as they explored the stall behaviour of the new aeroplane.
There were many things that were recognisable in all the checks and rigorous processes applied before the launch and during the spaceflight.
Before a flight test, there is a pre-flight briefing – often at an ungodly time in the morning, where the flight test engineer talks through the test order with the pilots, the test flight engineer, the chef d’ecoute (equivalent to CapComm) and the engineers who will be analysing the data in the telemetry room.
The test support I’ve performed has been to analyse the initial data and confirm trends and to check the manoeuvre quality and flight conditions.
Before and after flights investigating performance and handling qualities, the aircraft is inspected for any new dents or scratches, checks that instrumentation is in place where requested and to document with photos the configuration and installation of the aircraft.
Unless it’s a first flight, take-off is a lot less dramatic for an aircraft’s flight test. In fact, the first twenty minutes of the flight are usually a good moment to get ready in telemetry – setting up your tools to analyse and display data as it arrives, beginning a log file, documenting and archiving everything for future reference.
Once the manoeuvres start – assuming that the weather is stable enough to make good measurements – you barely notice the passage of time.
My husband correctly observed that watching each procedure during the Dragon flight as an audience member was a bit like watching unedited Big Brother – with interminably long pauses and apparently laborious checks made before each operation was performed.
Yet I’m willing to bet that for the people sitting in SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne – the time will have whizzed past. I’ve emerged from 7 hours in the telemetry room and been shocked to find it’s dark and the site is quiet. Whilst you are occupied following the data – 7 hours can seem like 90 minutes.
It seems like SpaceX and NASA are even fonder of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) and process numbers than we are in commercial aerospace! Yet the communications before each new operation reminded me of when test pilots and engineers talk through the process for engine shutdown. They discuss the procedure for restarting the engine in the event that the other engine fails during the test and the manoeuvre they will perform whilst the engine is shutdown.
All of this is to provide data for OEI (One Engine Inoperative) models which are used to certify the aircraft.
It was wonderful to see how the astronauts began all their speeches and answers to questions by recognising the teams who had contributed to the mission. Whenever you heard cheering and applause in mission control in Hawthorne and in Houston – you could hear that people weren’t only rejoicing that moment of success. They were celebrating years of striving that had brought all of them to this culmination of their work – the successful launch, flight and docking of the capsule, safely conveying the brave and highly professional, experienced astronauts to the ISS.
There is something of the same feeling about the first flight of a new aircraft.
I think what also gives rocket launches and first flights their power is the fact that they fulfil the fundamental purpose for the machine’s existence. An aircraft, is not really an aircraft unless it can fly. A rocket is not really a rocket unless it can successfully launch and convey it’s payload into orbit. The demonstration is the proof.
Also, in both fields, we can simulate, we can experiment, we can build on knowledge and understanding from the past – but today we haven’t fully captured all the physics that influences flight whether it’s in the atmosphere or in space. We’ve captured enough to be tremendously successful – but there are still elements of behaviour we only confirm on the full scale vehicles themselves.
That is why we test – to ensure that risk to passengers is minimised and that the machines we build are safe and well-characterised.
Space exploration – and in particular human spaceflight – can be a divisive topic.
Some people see it as a necessary and inevitable part of human destiny – that our future depends on us continuing to explore beyond the limits of our own planet.
Others see it as a waste of time and resources, a preoccupation of wealthy nations whilst failing to deal with poverty and deprivation back on Earth.
Most people probably sit somewhere in between. Our understanding of the Earth is in no small part due to the knowledge we’ve gained from satellite observations – which measure weather, pollution, changes in glaciation and ozone depletion in a way that gives us greater insight than at any previous time into the physical processes at work on our planet.
Human spaceflight is inspirational both for the years of discipline, training and sacrifice it requires – but also for the way that it demonstrates peaceful co-operation.
During the space race of the 50s and 60s, the competition between the Soviet Union and the USA was an extension of the Cold War – but it was far less damaging a competition than the arms race – and it became a powerful symbol of detente with the Apollo-Soyuz docking.
More recently, space has been dominated by international collaboration. The ISS crews have been drawn from a multitude of nations, who live together and work together for extended periods and whose mission continues after they’re back on Earth to educate and advocate for investment in STEM. The ISS itself was funded and built by an international consortium, with different groups building different modules and funding batches of experiments.
The retirement of the Space Shuttle meant that for the last 9 years, astronauts have travelled to the ISS via Soyuz craft. This has necessitated all astronauts learning Russian, training to use the Soyuz capsule and spending extended periods in Star City near Baikonur, where the launches take place. Even in the 80s, this would have seemed unimaginable – and despite the growing international tensions between the West and Russia – it’s an important example to hold on to.
Ultimately, flight within the Earth’s atmosphere and spaceflight are the product of the same desire – to travel and explore our environment – to connect with people in other places – to understand our place in the universe.
The Before Times – 03/06/2020
This week, three years ago, was a week in my life which arguably represents the biggest contrast between life before the pandemic and life now.
I was fortunate to get the opportunity to attend the AIAA Aviation 2017 conference, held in Denver, Colorado.
My journey began with an early morning 2 hour coach trip from Bristol to London Heathrow.
I’d gone particularly early, as I wanted to meet up with my uncle at the airport. He was flying back to LA following a business trip in the UK. As our extended family gatherings tend to converge around weddings, funerals and subsets of the family travelling across the Atlantic, it seemed like a great, albeit unusual opportunity to catch up for a coffee when we were both flying from Heathrow.
Having enjoyed chatting with him for an hour, we made our way to our respective terminals to go airside.
Ironically, I remember buying a small bottle of hand sanitiser in Boots as it struck me that Heathrow, like all busy international airports, is a sample of the population of all humanity and it was during the Zika virus outbreak in South America. Whilst I wasn’t pregnant – I knew plenty of people of childbearing age and didn’t want to put any of them at risk.
I also recall laughing out loud in the final queue to board the aircraft after seeing a photo from the news of a Londoner running away from a terrorist whilst carrying a full pint of lager. I appreciate this might seem like a highly inappropriate reaction to have whilst reading news about a terrorist attack – but having grown up in the suburbs of London, it seemed to sum up the ability of Londoners to do their utmost to nonchalantly get on with life even in the middle of threats to life.
That and the fact that the pint had probably cost him seven pounds…
The flight to Denver is around 10 hours and at the time British Airways were serving the route with Boeing 747-400s. I’d forgotten how long the take-off run is for a 747 and how noisy the engines are in comparison to those on new aircraft… yet the flight was uneventful.
Denver is a strange city. The central business district doesn’t seem to be bounded by any particular physical geographical features but includes the obligatory skyline of gleaming tall towers.
Although I didn’t get to see much of the city outside the centre, the impression that I got was that the outer suburbs didn’t seem all that affluent. Also, within the city centre, there was a large number of homeless people who seemed to have psychiatric illnesses or mental health problems, which contrasted powerfully with all the office workers in suits emerging from the office blocks to get morning coffee and lunch.
There were some older, more interesting parts of the city centre including a clock tower and a lovely, domed city hall. Also, there are spectacular views across the plains to the nearby Rocky Mountains.
The city is a mile above sea level, but sits on a vast plain so you don’t immediately appreciate its height. That is, until you run up a flight of stairs and feel as if you’ve just been whacked in the chest with an anvil!
The conference was held in the Sheraton Denver Downtown – which is a gigantic hotel in the city centre. I had looked at the weather forecast when packing – and seeing daily temperatures of 34 degrees I had mostly packed sleeveless blouses. As it happened, the reception rooms of the hotel, a lot of which are in the basement – are both enormous and efficiently air-conditioned. I don’t know what temperature they were set to – but it felt like that of a hospital mortuary.
All the Europeans at the conference spent the week freezing – even the men in suits!
The days were long – morning plenary sessions started around 8am and the final evening talks often finished around 7pm.
There were some interesting moments of cultural difference. A group of colleagues from Germany, France and Spain went for lunch at a cafe and several people ordered chips, only to look disappointed when their plates arrived with crisps…
There were also a number of occasions where people fluent in English as a second language were nonetheless used to speaking to British colleagues and couldn’t understand the American accents of local restaurant staff. I spent a lot of the week repeating menu specials….
Sometimes the problems were not with the accents but with different tastes – a French colleague was simply bewildered as to why anyone would want to eat their steak with shrimp….
The aerospace world is a small one in many ways. I had arranged to meet up with Airbus colleagues who were also attending from their home sites in Toulouse, Madrid and Bremen.
I also ran into friends and colleagues from external organisations that I’d worked with in the past:
From DLR and ONERA, the German and French national aerospace institutes.
From ETW, the European Transonic Wind tunnel.
From various universities in the UK – Bristol, Liverpool, Surrey.
I also saw people that I didn’t know but recognised from previous conferences I’d attended from NASA.
There were also representatives from universities and institutes all over the globe – it was particularly interesting to hear speakers from companies that I was aware of but hadn’t really interacted with such as Embraer. I also got the chance to meet a few people from Airbus America – which was lovely as I hadn’t had any direct contact with them previously.
The conference had a large military presence – with people predominantly from the USAF as you might expect, but also the US Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Australian Air Force.
It was a reminder of how vast a country the USA is too – people who were participating in the conference from domestic sites had travelled over a thousand miles in many cases…
It was also interesting to note the different levels of participation from different areas. There were large communities from the USA and from Europe. There were supposed to be a lot of speakers from China – but a large number of the sessions I attended included talks given by colleagues or associates as the Chinese nationals had not been granted visas in time to travel to the conference.
During the conference, there were some themes that were repeatedly discussed as the biggest existential threats and likely changes to the aerospace industry.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of these related to climate change and decarbonisation of the aerospace industry, particularly with respect to alternate means of propulsion – and this was the topic of a keynote speech given by the then Airbus CTO Paul Eremenko.
Reducing fuel burn and noise has been a key goal for the aerospace industry since the 70s – and in the last 20 years has become a particular focus for reduction of CO2 and NOx emissions. In the last few years, the emphasis has moved from reduction of fuel burn towards alternate fuels – and the need to accelerate on this was beginning even before the discussion on climate crisis and Extinction Rebellion entered public consciousness.
Even the talks from the military participants were often focused on drag reduction technologies or formation flying to reduce fuel burn!
There was also a lot of emphasis on autonomous vehicles and personal electric flying taxis – in particular an acknowledgement that their technological development was not being accompanied by transformation of regulations or development of infrastructure.
Strikingly, I arrived at a room to listen to a panel session on digital aircraft certification which followed a session on electric autonomous vehicles – and virtually all the audience were leaving.
“Don’t they want to certify their electric planes?” I asked a colleague facetiously.
There were a number of talks on the potential threat of an entity like Google deciding that they wanted to get into aerospace and the likely, credible threat they could present to large, established companies like Airbus and Boeing.
Oddly, there were at least three companies represented talking about supersonic business jets, particularly in relation to the NASA quiet sonic boom demonstrator, which seemed strange as whilst it’s an area that the industry likes to revisit – it doesn’t seem like there is any more market for a new product here than there ever was.
More intriguingly, there were several presentations on hyperloops – in particular from university teams who had entered the SpaceX competition.
I had an amazing week. The days were filled with interesting discussions and presentations – and even towards the end of the week where it seemed like the schedule was more variable in its quality there were still some gems to whet my appetite. In the evenings, I got the chance to get to know some colleagues better that I already knew and meet others that I hadn’t worked with before. We were all enjoying eating out and getting a glimpse of life in a city we didn’t know in a different country – even if it was within the confines of a business trip. On the journey home, I remember initially feeling too wired to sleep – and spending some time after dinner writing down my thoughts on the key themes and ideas from the conference before finally acknowledging that I needed to try and get a few hours sleep before we arrived back in London.
Yet when I think of the themes I wrote about, although there had already been the SARS and MERS outbreaks – and the conference took place during the Zika outbreak – there was no real foreshadowing of the biggest shock the aerospace industry has experienced. Rooms full of people who had travelled from all over the Earth spent the week discussing research and development to enable us to keep making travel safer and cleaner.
There were even some jokes around the fact that one British speaker had arrived in Denver and then promptly spent the first four days of his trip holed up in his hotel room with a stomach bug – so when he finally emerged none of us really wanted to shake hands with him!
Like the aliens in War of the Worlds, we basked in our technological achievement, only to be laid low by the tiniest micro-organisms that exist.
I’m not criticising anyone or claiming that we should have seen this coming – the reality is that even once the industry starts to recover, the biggest challenge will still be decarbonisation.
Yet this pandemic has brought home to all of us – and particularly those of us in the West whose lives are relatively secure, that our daily existence can hang by more fragile threads then we ever imagined. You can prepare for all sorts of threats, only to find that the one that is most significant is not the one you expected.
I know that the current crisis won’t go on forever. The Spanish flu outbreak killed more people than World War 1 – yet there aren’t memorials in every village and town as there are to the war – and the pandemic is treated as a footnote in most History textbooks.
Shakespeare lived through minor outbreaks of plague – yet its only appearance in his plays is as an expedient plot device – for example to explain why a messenger is delayed in Romeo and Juliet. Whilst we are living through it, life before – and particularly experiences of international travel and conferences – seem almost fantastic.
Hopefully, in three years time – this period will also seem fantastic and a distant memory.
Making the world accessible to all – 04/06/2020
Recalling the week of AIAA 2017 and comparing it with this week seems like trying to remember a laudanum fuelled steampunk dream.
This is mainly due to the pandemic and its unprecedented massive impact on everyday life – but also due to the depressingly precedented chain of events that has unfolded – starting with the racist killing of George Floyd by white police officers in the USA.
I remember as a child at school seeing coverage of the riots in LA and other cities following the acquittal of four police officers for the beating of Rodney King. At the time, the satirical programme Spitting Image covered the trial by depicting the judge asking,
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, how do you find the defendants?”
The camera panned round to show the jury clad in Ku Klux Klan robes with a burning cross, declaring
“Not guilty, your honour”
The protests that started in the USA have been echoed by protests in several major cities in the UK and France. Now it’s fair to say that the three countries all have different approaches and histories when it comes to race, multiculturalism and integration. It’s also fair to say that none of them have come up with an approach that is totally successful.
Whilst people in the UK have a tendency to congratulate themselves and claim that we live in a much less racist country than the USA – we have our own share of troubling deaths of black people in police custody and lack of representation of people from BAME backgrounds in positions of power and influence.
I’ll never have the same experience that people of colour have or will be able to fully understand the challenges and difficulties they’ve encountered in everyday life – however I try to listen and acknowledge when people share their personal stories.
For instance, I recall how friends at school with multiracial backgrounds had suffered from racist comments within their own extended families.
I also recall how the casually racist careers adviser’s first response to a black girl at school who had expressed interest in studying law at university was to suggest she consider nursing.
However – when I look at the aerospace industry – look at my community of colleagues and the participants at conferences I’ve been to – it is noticeable that the majority of people at them are white, albeit now with a growing number of Chinese and Japanese people.
There are often a few people from the Indian subcontinent or with origins in that area – although interestingly at the few conferences I’ve been to these have often been people who’ve spent their adult lives and careers in the UK. This should hopefully change as we see the growth of Airbus India and first and second tier suppliers.
Yet at RAeS Applied Aerodynamics, DiPart and AIAA, black participants have been noticeably few – even taking into account the demographics of the UK and USA. (These indicate, that you might expect 13% of participants in the USA and 3% in the UK to be black.)
This raises a few questions:
Why is this?
What can we do to address it?
Why do we need to do anything?
Why is this?
It’s probably a combination of factors.
Some linked to number of engineering graduates from which to draw employees from. (Currently 25% of Engineering graduates are from Black and Ethnic Minority backgrounds in the UK, but only 7.8% of engineers in the UK are from Black or Minority ethnic backgrounds)
Some linked to aspiration and historical tradition – whilst there have been famous black aviators (Bessie Coleman) and astronauts (Mae Jemison, amongst others) – aerospace engineers and pioneers are predominantly white and male.
Some linked to bias in the system.
What can we do to address it?
The first step really needs to be taken in schools. We won’t increase the numbers of engineers from diverse backgrounds if we don’t have children aspiring to these careers. Part of it may require moving out of the cities in which the aerospace industry is based. Whilst Bristol prides itself on being multicultural, the ethnic diversity is limited in comparison to eg London – so there needs to be outreach from all the cities with strong aerospace engineering departments in their universities to promote the industry.
We also need to talk to colleagues from different backgrounds about their experiences in the workplace and act on them. If the automatic reaction to a difficult conversation is to respond by arguing that we’re not racist and that there’s no systemic bias – then we’re not listening and we are certainly not learning.
Why do we need to address it?
This is an interesting question. The consequences of not addressing it are different from in some other industries – for instance, big data algorithms have unearthed problems with discrimination where the training datasets have shown that white men make up the majority of recruited applicants, so programmes begin to remove women and BAME people from their shortlists.
There are also plenty of instances of practical problems – for instance automated soap dispensers that don’t work for people with skin other than Caucasian because the predominantly white developers didn’t think to test them for other skintones.
However, it’s unlikely that we will end up with an accidentally racist aeroplane.
Here is where we run into difficulties.
People write column inches about how companies that are diverse are more successful, or better at communication or that diversity is A Good Thing and therefore to be encouraged.
The reality is, we need greater representation of BAME people, women and LBGT+ for the simple reason that ours is an interesting, cool industry which at its heart is about connecting the world. Consequently, if it’s seen as closed off or inaccessible by a large percentage of the potential talent pool, then it’s got a smaller population of people to recruit from.
It’s not about tokenism or positive discrimination, or forcing people to follow paths to fulfil artificial constructs about equality.
It’s about those of us who are in the majority white population in the industry saying, just because the majority of people that currently work here don’t look like you – you are still welcome – and needed – and wanted – and as the playing field isn’t level, we will listen and do what we can to flatten it out.
In defence of the four day week – 05/06/2020
I’ve spent much of my working life on a part-time working pattern.
From 2006 to 2012 I worked for three days a week whilst my sons were small. After my younger son turned 3, I increased my hours to four days a week and have maintained that pattern ever since. In reality, this is not a particularly big cut in hours as the standard work pattern for my colleagues is 35 hours and I work 30.
I maintained it even after my younger son started school as it means there is one day of the week I use for housework and errands to free up more time to spend with my family at the weekend.
It also means that there is one day of the week when I’m not picking him up from after school club and in the last couple of years it had become a tradition for us to go for a drink and a cake in a local cafe before he went for his swimming lesson.
At work, the four day week has been something of a talking point over the years. It was within company policy and my immediate managers have been broadly supportive. However it tended to attract some pass-remarkable comments and a perception from some other colleagues that it signalled a lack of ambition or commitment.
Over the years, the numbers of negative comments have reduced. This is probably in part because I’ve delivered on challenging projects and timescales, including flight test and wind tunnel tests.
It’s also due to a gradual change in working culture, moving away from clockwatching and presenteeism towards valuing productivity and people meeting their deliverables.
Yet even within the changes in culture, there still tended to be an attitude that working four days a week, or regular working from home, whilst acceptable – was not something to be encouraged en masse. Also, there still tended to be a failure to recognise that suggesting people who work 4 days participate in something on their non-working day is equivalent to asking people who work full time to come in on a Saturday.
There are also periods where I’ve found myself having to put in 1-2 extra hours on a Friday. This is often linked to travel – but sometimes due to working effectively a full time role in reduced hours.
The lockdown for Covid-19 has brought a lot of challenges and difficulties for everyone in different ways. However, I’ve noticed amongst my colleagues that it is opening some people’s eyes to the experience of others in a way that life in the office didn’t. Seeing and hearing people having to deal with their children has shown the juggling act working parents face more directly than any anecdote or testimonial.
Realising that people can work productively even when they’re at home, not under the watchful eye of team leaders is changing people’s perception of working from home as a reasonable solution for a regular pattern.
Equally, the difficulties with loneliness and mental health that many are struggling with reduced human interaction have demonstrated that going to complete remote-working is not a desirable blanket solution.
Also, there have been moments where all our reactions have taken us by surprise. I had felt intensely worried and concerned for people who were pregnant or looking after new babies during the pandemic. However, when a colleague shared photos of working from home whilst cuddling his newborn daughter, I felt a twinge of envy that when my sons were tiny, my husband could only enjoy time with them outside of working hours.
If there is a positive to come out of the lockdown – hopefully it will be a greater recognition that blanket approaches are not useful – and that teams can agree work patterns based upon people’s objectives and needs.
In terms of my own work pattern – there has been an ironic coda. Amidst the crisis the aerospace industry is facing, colleagues in France, Germany and Spain have all been put on an enforced four day week that matches my regular pattern. Thus all the meetings that I couldn’t cover in the past on my non-working day are now to be moved to different days of the week. Yet I can’t take advantage of this as I’m on furlough….
I will be interested to see how my colleagues experience a four day week for an extended period. Some companies – and in the case of New Zealand entire countries – have been considering this as a means of improving work life balance and productivity. One of the major oppositions to it in the past has been that it prevents coverage of problems on the non-working day and means that people aren’t available to their customers and teams during a recognised working period. The post Covid-19 period offers the opportunity to reset and work around that barrier.
For the last couple of years, I had begun to consider whether I should return to full time working. I had contemplated whether continuing to work 4 days a week was holding my career back – either by giving the wrong impression or because I was simply not always around and visible. In the short term, the question is an academic one. The principle challenge will be getting through the next few months. In the longer term, I wonder whether the question will be superseded? Once everyone has experienced a four day week – maybe it will be seen as normal.
Tempus Fugit – 08/06/2020
In all honesty, I think my greatest fear about being out of the office on furlough is losing my currency. This fear is twofold. Partly it stems from the fact that I don’t have visibility of what is happening, what is developing inside the company whilst I’m out of the office – other than what is publically released in the press.
The other part of it is the fear of being out of sight and out of mind.
I’ve lived through this aspect before. When I was out on maternity leave with my sons, I was out of the office for a year. On both occasions, there were challenges associated with coming back – but it wasn’t necessarily the ones I’d expected.
I thought that I would have problems picking up the tools, coming to grips with advances in CFD and supercomputing. As it turned out, my maternity leaves did coincide with some fairly big changes. In 2005, when I went on maternity leave with my first son, we were still routinely using Euler viscous-coupled flow solvers in a lot of design work. When I returned in 2006, we were beginning to use Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes solvers more frequently, albeit with a relatively poor interface for industrialised running.
During my second maternity leave from 2009-2010, there weren’t the same jumps in solver type, but there were upgrades in computing, interfaces and post-processing.
Yet in fact, these changes were quite simple to adapt to – and after a few days of limited productivity setting up new accounts and trying things out I adjusted fast.
In fact, the harder changes to adjust to were linked to reclaiming my place in the team.
Whilst the colleagues that knew me were pleased to see me back and supportive of my questions and reintegration – there were often changes both at upper levels and amongst peers. This tended to mean a period of feeling like I was on probation – having to demonstrate my competence and my abilities again to justify getting interesting work and being included in discussions about resourcing for new projects and activities. This seemed to be the case even though my immediate manager at the time was highly supportive.
Admittedly, this time the furlough represents a much shorter timeframe – and I am at a different stage in my career. Also, I’m not isolated in my experience – half of Engineering in the UK is also on furlough at the same time.
Yet I still feel concerned that as things evolve when I’m not there, I will miss key moments.
There is not a lot I can do about that. All I can do, is be prepared to dive back in when I return to work and be willing to show my readiness to take on whatever activity is needed.