Professor Graham Clark has joined the AADI Defence team as an Associate.
As the Innovation Professor, Aeronautical Design, at RMIT University in Melbourne, Graham leads research into the degradation of aircraft components, repair, life extension and crashworthiness. He has served as the Australian National Delegate to the International Committee on Aeronautical Fatigue, as the National Leader of the Materials Performance in Systems panel of The Technical Cooperation Program, and on numerous structural review teams/panel. He has written over 250 publications in the structural integrity area, and has received numerous ‘best paper’ awards.
Prior to joining RMIT, Prof. Clark was Research Leader, Structural Integrity at DSTO Melbourne. He was responsible for leading basic research on aircraft structures, including full-scale testing, and providing program support to the Australian Defence Force. This included responsibility for providing DSTO’s advice to the Australian Defence Force on all fleet aircraft life and structural integrity issues. During his career at DSTO he held key roles in DSTO's efforts in support of the ADF, including assessing aircraft structural and materials defects, failures and deterioration, providing support for defect assessment, NDE and major full-scale fatigue tests. He also led DSTO's Accident Investigations Team over a period in which some 50 accidents and incidents were investigated, including several very demanding investigations which identified major issues with fleet airworthiness and led to extensive research programs for fleet recovery.
He is a fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia.
Graham’s lifetime of achievement in aviation engineering has been recognised in many ways:
- John W Lincoln Medal (awarded by USAir Force
- Plantema Memorial award (International Committee on Aeronautical Fatigue)
- Air Vice Marshal Dietz Medallion for Outstanding Quality of Advice to RAAF (RAAF)
- Director's Award for Outstanding Research, DSTO Materials Research Laboratories (DSTO)
- DSTO Achievement Award for Outstanding Science & Technology (DSTO)
- Achievement Award, The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP)
- Chief Defence Scientist’s Award for Excellent Science and Professional Judgement in support of HMAS Collins (ADF)
- Award for Best Technical Advice to Australian Defence Force (ADF)
Dr Nick Jans has joined the AADI Defence team as an Associate.
Nick Jans began his career in industry after 25 years in the Australian Army, where he worked in field artillery, training, internal consultancy and personnel policy development. Since that time he has consulted to a wide variety of public, private and military organisations in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, including the Australian Tax Office, Australian Customs Service, Australia Post, Defence, ASIO, Victoria Police, the US Navy, NAB and Schlumberger Wireline & Testing.
In addition to his new role as an Associate of AADI Defence, Nick is a principal of Sigma Consultancy, and Visiting Fellow, Leadership and Military Sociology, Centre for Defence Leadership & Ethics, Australian Defence College.
Previous positions held by Nick include Director of Employee Research (Asia-Pacific), Towers Perrin, and Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Canberra.
Nick has a Ph.D. in Organisational Behaviour from the University of South Australia.
He is a Member of the Order of Australia, for service to national security and defence capability.
To see an up-to-date list of our Principals and Associates, visit our website here.
On Monday 6 December aadiDefence Principal Dr Bill Schofield delivered the Hargrave Memorial Lecture to the Melbourne Branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society (Australian Division).
Bill Schofield is one of Australia’s leading scientists with a career spanning forty years in the Department of Defence and as a consultant on aeronautical and defence technology for Australian Industry.
He was the Director of the Aeronautical and Maritime Research Laboratory for six years where he was responsible for all science and technology for the Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force. Before this Dr Schofield held the positions of First Assistant Secretary Science Policy, Chief of Air Vehicles Division and Chief of Flight Mechanics & Propulsion Division in the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).
He was a co-author of the “Kinnaird” report to Cabinet into defence acquisition practices which now sets the guidelines for all Defence acquisitions. Between 1996 and 2006 he served on a number of advisory panels for the Victorian Government. He has led reviews of Australian defence industry for both the Federal and Victorian governments and was appointed by Federal Cabinet to the Board of the Australian Submarine Corporation [2006-2009]. He is Chairman of the CRC for Advanced Composite Structures and on the board of another four defence and aeronautical related companies.
Dr David Warren AO: the Scientist, the Black Box Saga and Lessons learnt
Australians have, from the earliest pioneering times, always been inventive. Faced with a difficult problem but few resources they have time and again come up with a practical solution. They have shown determination in the face of opposition and usually great persistence in following their vision. David Warren was such a person and his invention of the Flight Recorder, known throughout the world as the black box, exemplified this tradition. I worked for David, and later, with him as a colleague in the same DSTO division and we became good friends. He was an inspiring scientist, great fun to work with and an irritant to all administrations he came into contact with. In the next forty minutes or so I will try to illustrate these points. It is important to remember that the black box saga started almost 60 years ago in a very different Australia from the one we live in today: with different allegiances, institutional structures and culture.
So let me start at the beginning.
Soon after I graduated I went to the Melbourne University Appointments Board looking for a job in research. The man at the Appointments Board handed me a set of cards from his engineering research box – each card had the name of the employing organisation, a description of its work, a duty statement of the position, the salary band and contact details. When I had read them all he said to me, “I’ve got another job here, but I am afraid I know very little about it” – he then handed over a card on which was typed the words “If you want to do research ring Dave Warren” – and that, apart from a telephone number, was the total information provided. This very slender piece of information was my introduction to a life in research and also to David Warren’s way of getting around the regulations concerning the approved method of advertising and recruiting staff into the public service.
And so one day forty five years ago, a very young Bill Schofield turned up at the Aeronautical Research Laboratories to work as David’s assistant. He greeted me with the news that he had thought up a way to eradicate rabbits by building a very inefficient but stable burner that could be built into the exhaust pipe of a farm tractor, to produce sufficient carbon monoxide to asphyxiate rabbits, and.... the beauty of it all was that the back pressure of the tractor engine could also be used to pump down the burrow a mixture of foam filled with carbon monoxide from a foam unit attached to the end of the tractor’s exhaust pipe. At this stage I thought to myself, “They did say aeronautical research didn’t they?” Anyway, Dave said that my first job was to go up to the front gate and pick up a large box from the Department of Vermin and Noxious Weeds that contained 10 wild rabbits. So I walked up to the front gate and took possession of a box with rabbits inside going Kaboom – Kaboom and I thought to myself David seems to be an unconventional chemist. And so he turned out to be.
When I returned with the box Dave got right into it saying that the first thing to establish was how much carbon monoxide was needed to kill an Australian Bush Rabbit: he went on to explain that as they lived in confined burrows they could probably survive in an atmosphere with a carbon monoxide concentration that would kill human beings. In not much time at all Dave had cobbled up a crude electrocardiogram to detect the rabbit’s heart beat as we fed it increasing amounts of carbon monoxide. Having finished this he addressed the problem of how to measure the rabbit’s breathing rate. His solution to this problem was to use a long thin balloon wrapped around the rabbit’s chest with a small microphone inside it, so that as the rabbit breathed it would compress the balloon and the change in pressure would be detected by the microphone.
He then announced my second job – which was to go out and buy three dozen long thin balloons. Now in those days these long thin balloons were only sold at chemists and chemists in those days were not even allowed to advertise them and what’s more, from my experience that day, three dozen of these balloons was an exceptionally large order for a young lad like myself – so large that I had to go to two chemists’ shops to buy three dozen of them – working in the public service was turning out to be more exciting than I had anticipated. When I returned with them in a brown paper bag, David said, "Bill you are now working for the public service, which you will have to come to terms with, so take those receipts up to the front office and make a claim through the Commonwealth petty cash system" --- so up I went to the front office and found the clerk in charge of the petty cash. However, what David had neglected to tell me was that he had the week before put in a petty cash claim for three boxes of Monopole magnum cigars [to produce smoke for airflow studies] and 10 dozen sparklers [to light his combustion chambers] – the public service clerk slowly considered my receipts for three dozen condoms, gave me a funny look and then said, “Could you ask Dr Warren that if he is running parties down in Building 19 can we please be invited?”.
In all I would have to say it was a memorable first day in my new job.
David was a great example for a young graduate to work with – he was above everything else incredibly enthusiastic – he was also visionary, persistent, multi-skilled and if there was a box Dave was supposed to think inside, Dave had never heard of it. On top of this he had an attitude to authority that was unconventional to say the least. If he considered that an administrative decision was in any way faulty, there was but one thing to do – you went direct into the Chief’s or Director’s office and put him straight immediately and kept up pressure until the unhelpful administrative decision was reversed. It is no exaggeration to say that in most cases this did little to endear him to management.
David’s work habits were highly enthusiastic but also rather unconventional. In my first month at ARL we worked back quite late every second night. I would turn up the next morning at the appointed starting time of 9 o’clock and then usually wait for Dave to arrive sometime later, I think the record was 11 am. One Friday night we working on developing the rabbit-killing highly inefficient burner when at about 7 o’clock, much to my relief he said – “I have to go and take Ruth to the pictures.” My relief was short lived, however, as David’s next sentence was, “Wait here, I’ll be back in about 45 minutes”.
David’s next idea was a new type of impingement cooling system for a jetpipe. For the heat source he built a tunnel burner which achieved the mixing of fuel and air by an oscillating shock wave that made a very loud, single tone noise. Such was the intensity of this ear piercing noise that we could only run it after hours when everyone else had left for the day. It was January and a very hot night when we started at about 7 pm and the air temperature in the lab gradually rose hour after hour until near midnight it was 50 degrees in the lab and we were both sweating profusely, we had stripped down to our underwear, but retained our safety boots, safety glasses and earmuffs.
Suddenly, bursting through the door with a fire hose at the ready came the Port Melbourne fire brigade – we had set off the fire alarm in the lab, but because of the noise of the tunnel burner and our earmuffs we hadn’t heard it. The astonished look on the firemen’s faces, wondering what on earth they had come across as they confronted two strangely dressed sweating scientists working on this flaming wailing test article, stays with me to this day.
Working with Dave was never dull.
I joined ARL in 1965 when the work on the black box was winding down – David had written his first memo on the idea some 11 years before, and it was about the time I joined him that Davalls in the UK released its Series 1100 Red Egg crash recorder based on David’s work. David often talked to me at length about the history of the flight recorder and it always seemed to me that he was not so much angry that he had not been taken seriously by the powers that be, but was upset that in the end, Australia missed out, through gross ineptitude, on exploiting an invention of which there are today hundreds of thousands in aircraft, ships, trains and trucks, and are now being introduced into cars overseas.
A book simply entitled Black Box was written by Janice Witham who collaborated closely with David Warren – it was published in 2005 by Lothian Books and I had the honour of launching it at the 2005 Avalon Air Show. It tells the story in more detail than I have time to cover here tonight.
The Black Box saga started in the wake of the famous Comet crashes in the 1950s. At that period Australia, and ARL in particular, was closely wedded to the UK – not just because of the strong historical links between Australia and the UK that governed most things at that time but also because ARL was led by its founder Laurie Coombes, who had come out from the UK’s Royal Aeronautical Establishment in 1938 to set up ARL as a carbon copy of the Royal Aeronautical Establishment.
ARL in those days had little research connection with the US aircraft industry – its international aeronautical collaboration was mainly through the now defunct Commonwealth Aeronautical Advisory Research Council – CAARC – and this was particularly so in the Engines Division of ARL where David worked. All the senior people at ARL had at some time been seconded to the RAE or to the UK’s National Gas Turbine Establishment. So when the Comets were inexplicably crashing, all the member countries of Commonwealth Aeronautical Advisory Research Council convened their best and brightest to assist the UK in what was immediately seen as a threat to the UK’s aircraft industry if not to jet air travel in general.
David was invited to the first of these meetings, and as a combustion chemist he was tasked with calculating whether the Comet’s fuel tanks could have exploded and caused the crash. David duly presented his calculations showing that exploding fuel tanks was a highly unlikely explanation for the crash and when he had finished his presentation he was stuck in the all-day meeting while others said things like ‘ we have to face the prospect that we may never know why these Comets are crashing’.
And that statement was the “ah-ha” moment when Dave said to himself, “What we haven’t got here is any data” but he then thought, “How to get data after a crash when everything could be burnt and destroyed?” – and then he thought of the world’s first wire recorder – the Minifon – that he had seen just two weeks before at Australia’s first post war trade fair. He thought that probably the people on the doomed Comet would have known what was wrong and could have recorded it, and if the recording medium was wire not tape it would survive the crash.
This is a photo of David holding the Minifon recorder that he kept all his life.
Lesson one. Breakthrough ideas often come to prepared minds that have all the facts but are unfocussed and even bored with what they are doing at the time...
In fact we now know that the Comets crashed due to metal fatigue initiated at square window corners and no one would have had time to record anything. But interestingly the first thought was to record the pilot’s speech not the aircraft data.
David went back to the laboratory and wrote his famous memo proposing an aircraft flight recorder; the Memo is only a few pages long giving an outline of the idea to record cockpit data on wire. The tech memo concluded with a request for permission to work on the idea. His Divisional chief saw some merit in the idea but reminded David that his job was “as a combustion chemist blowing up fuel tanks not building electronic instruments”. And so David’s idea was duly passed to the Instruments section in another division, the Aerodynamics Division, in order for David to get on with doing what he was paid to do. Quite unsurprisingly the Instruments Section in Aerodynamics Division had its own research program and as it was not their idea in the first place they did absolutely nothing with it. Which brings us to our second lesson.
Lesson two: Laboratory managers often believe that the agreed program of work in any well run laboratory should not be deflected by interesting but unproven ideas and that scientists should stick to what they are employed to do.
And of course
The “not-invented – here” syndrome is always a strong performer in any technical innovation story.
So nothing happened for some time, until something very important in this story occurred – a new head of David’s Engine Division was appointed. His name was Tom Keeble, and Tom for all his faults just loved good ideas and supported David through thick and thin for over a decade in the face of often fierce opposition and ridicule, and is one of the heroes of this story.
Lesson three: It helps to have top cover when you are fighting entrenched opposition.
While nothing had been done with David’s idea by Instruments Section, Comets continued to crash and were eventually withdrawn from service; and as we know recovery of wreckage from two crashes led in time to the conclusion that fatigue cracking had been the cause of the crashes.
David, while still officially conducting research into combustion chemistry, had no resources to work on the Flight Recorder. His new boss Tom Keeble, however, said nobody could stop him writing an expanded version of his proposal. So David wrote a more substantial technical report which defined all the essential attributes of a flight recorder. Much of what he wrote in this second publication stands up very well today after four decades of flight recording. This report was sent to all aviation organisations in Australia and around the world.
David and Tom waited anxiously for the responses from their colleagues and friends around the world. After several months they had not received a single response from anyone. So they then submitted the same report to the Commonwealth Advisory Aeronautical Research Council which had to review any report submitted to it. After some months they received the minutes of the meeting which solemnly recorded that “after some discussion it was agreed that no action should be taken”.
So David and Tom continued to face the problem that there was no official laboratory program on flight recording. Tom Keeble then suggested that they buy a Minifon wire recorder, as “office equipment,” and test its ability to record cockpit conversation. This work was done completely unofficially and I don’t know what David’s time was booked to during this period but he always recommended to me that general laboratory services was a good one to use as was the cleaning number.
David’s tests with the Minifon showed that the background noise drowned out cockpit voices, which led him to experiment with different types of microphones set into the instrument panel, or on the cockpit roof, or at the sides of the cockpit. Our combustion chemist then started to design filtersto delete the background noise and he eventually decided that improvements could be made by removing the high and low frequencies and that he could use these frequencies to record at least two sets of aircraft data as well as voice on the wire. And so aircraft data entered the recordings. To record the data he designed transducers to convert the analogue signals from the aircraft instruments into digital signals in the form of Morse code.
Lesson four: Good scientists need to be "multi-skilled".
This instrument built around a Minfon recorder worked OK but to get people really interested David knew he had to make a practical prototype to demonstrate it working. Again Tom Keeble backed him and expended $1200 of his divisions cash budget on a piece of equipment very vaguely described in the division’s accounts as a “laboratory Instrument” – $1200 was quite a lot of money in those days – it was about the yearly starting salary for a professional engineer, say $50,000 in today’s money. Although David’s project had no official endorsement the Laboratory Director Laurie Coombes by this stage knew what was going on in Building 19 down the back of the site.
Lesson five: Sometimes you can’t tell the authorities what you are actually doing because the authorities need deniability. .
And so the first flight recorder of practical design was constructed and, nearly five years after Dave’s first memo he had a working prototype. It was to be a fit and forget system that continuously recorded and stored four hours’ data and voice on a continuous wire spool. This photo shows the first experimental recorder made by Tich Murfield:
And this photo shows David with the first flight recorder in a box that would survive a crash. It is held today at the DSTO laboratory in Melbourne where it was invented.
The break came from an entirely unexpected quarter. Sir Robert Hardingham, the Secretary of the Air Registration Board of Britain, visited ARL in a general tour of Australia. He was shown the Recorder by the Laboratory Director Laurie Coombes during a lunch hour break – his immediate response was ‘Now that’s a damn good idea – Coombes put that young lad and his gadget on the next Hastings courier to London’. In passing it is hard to imagine a UK official directing an Australian Lab director in such a manner these days.
It is interesting to note that:
- In spite of David doing everything he could think of to publicise his concept in Australia and overseas, and
- The close connection of ARL to the UK, and
- It was the UK that had had the Comet crashes and
- In the UK-led CAARC where David had had his concept considered - the head of UK Air Registration Board had never heard of the idea.
Lesson six: in transmitting new ideas, face to face contact is usually the only effective way.
This very welcome invitation posed a difficult problem, however, for the management of ARL, because as far as the Headquarters of the Department of Supply in Canberra was concerned the project did not exist, if in fact they had ever heard of it. So Coombes recommended to Canberra that Dr Warren attend the Seventh International Symposium on Combustion in the UK, in spite of the fact that combustion had been a rather minor interest of David’s for some years. They did slip in on the last page of the 10 page travel request the sentence that David would “discuss a novel apparatus which he has developed for determining the cause of aircraft accidents”.
The fact that this elicited no response from Canberra shows what I have always suspected – that no one read those interminable overseas visits requests that we had to write. In preparation for his visit David wrote a new paper entitled “A Device for Retaining Data in Aircraft Accidents” and then really pushed the Australian authorities for some response to the memos he had sent them over the years as he wanted to go to the UK with the backing of his own country, because as we all know, the first question when you take a new invention overseas is – “and what is the response from your home market?”.
Just in time before he left, a letter arrived from the Department of Civil Aviation in which the opinions held by aviation experts round the world of the value, if any, of fitting flight recorders were reviewed. The letter concluded with a phrase that has become infamous; it stated that “Dr Warren’s device has little immediate direct use in civil aircraft.”
This was bad, but worse was to follow in the form of a letter from the RAAF that stated, “Such a device is not required. In our opinion the recorder would yield more expletives than explanations”.
Lesson seven: officialdom seldom supports innovation when writing on official letterhead.
The lack of official support expressed in these two letters is not I think unusual – what is unusual is the strong negativity expressed - the norm in such cases is to be non-committal but also non-helpful. The negativity I think revealed some hostility to the invention.
And so David went to the UK with not only no support from the home market but two officially sanctioned negative assessments.
In the main David’s presentations and demonstrations in the UK were well received by scientists, regulatory authorities and aircraft companies. It is however interesting that few of them saw the flight recorder as something that would be fitted to all aircraft – they saw it essentially as something to be put on prototypes in case they crashed during development. The Bristol Aircraft company sent a telegram asking for a quotation for the delivery and price of two only flight recorders: a response would have been quite difficult for ARL as flight recorders were yet to be an official project and ARL was far from becoming a manufacturing company. The trip also revealed that there were a number of instrument companies starting to develop competing products and some manufacturers talked to him about marrying their ideas with his or taking over the development of the devicethemselves; however only on the condition that the UK air registration board officially endorsed it.
You will possibly have noted that up to now I have not mentioned the word “patents” and this was now being raised by the UK manufacturers who assumed that David had patented the device. However David as a public servant had assigned his patent right to the Commonwealth and the flight recorder project as far as the Commonwealth was concerned still did not exist so not even a provisional patent had been lodged.
In contrast to Australia the UK was so enthusiastic that David asked for permission to come back through Canada and the US to demonstrate the recorder, and surprisingly for the times permission was granted although the overseas trip was officially to study combustion processes. In the US and Canada he saw a raft of competing systems under development none of which in the end proved to be practical. The strong impression gained from the US was that they were not interested in anything that did not originate in the US.
Lesson seven:not invented here is usually stronger internationally than domestically.
On his return, Laboratory Director Coombes wrote to the Head of the UK Air Registration Board stating that the US was not interested but they had some interest from UK companies to develop the device. He then essentially gave the project away for Australia by finishing the letter with the statement, “The crash recorder is not strictly in Warren’s line of country as he is a physical chemist working on combustion and we would be glad to get rid of the commercial development”. Coombes then wrote another letter to Australia House in London stating that something could come out of full development by a UK company and “We hope this will eventuate as we should like to get rid of the device which is not strictly in our line of business’ – what!!! This is the Aeronautical Research Laboratories saying it is not its job to advance aeronautical sciences. However, it was agreed that David had to write up a patent application for the recorder.
The urgency of patenting was quickly dispelled, however, by some considered responses arriving from the UK companies – Ultra Electric concluded that there was no market for a crash recorder and EMI had assessed the market to be at most 200-500 units a year and therefore not commercially viable.
Completely undeterred David decided that he would have to build a preproduction model to demonstrate its utility – he would build a new a recorder with a longer recording period and much enhanced data recording. The main unit would contain the speech amplifier, multiplexing switch, flight data electronics and reserve power supply and would be housed in the standard radio rack – the second unit would hold the wire continuous recording unit in a fire proof container housed in the aircraft’s tail. Meanwhile there were increasing reports that rival systems to aid crash investigation were under consideration or under development.
On 10 June 1960 a Fokker Friendship crashed attempting to land at Mackay airport in foggy conditions. The subsequent Board of Inquiry was informed about David’s recorder with the result that in the Board’s report it firmly recommended that flight recorders be developed for Australian passenger aircraft. Two weeks later the Federal Government announced that from 1 January 1963Australian civil passenger aircraft had to be equipped with instruments to record both conversation and data. Australia was the first country in the world to mandate the fitment of flight recorders, and this was completely as a consequence of David’s unrelenting advocacy. The Department of Civil Aviation now maintained they had always wanted a large number of parameters recorded on civil aircraft, but in seven years they had not once asked to see the ARL recorder. The minutes of a meeting in the Department of Civil Aviation which was convened to see how to comply with the government’s directive said “our approach may close the doors to the ARL recorder unit because of its lack of development.”
Meanwhile Canberra had not progressed submitting the patent application on the grounds that the ARL report which contained a full description of the recorder had had a worldwide distribution.
Lesson 8: Always put in a provisional patent before you publish anything...
That said, in this case it would have been very difficult as ARL did not recognise the project until it had world wide interest initiated by David’s publications, and for David to patent it in his own name would have broken public service regulations.
On 7 September 1961 ARL learned by reading the Australian Financial Review that although the two Australian domestic airlines had been in negotiations with ARL for some time, they had both placed an order for flight recorders from a US company, United Data Control. These United Data Control recorders were heavy, recorded only 30 minutes of voice and were later found to be unreliable and in fact were unserviceable at the time of an air disaster at Winton involving an aircraft to which they had been fitted.
In spite of this David and his team continued the development of their prototype and on 23 March 1962 the first and only flight test of the new recorder on a Fokker Friendship performed faultlessly – the data and speech recognition had an accuracy of 99% and a time discrimination of about a tenth of a second. The team had increased the speed of the recordings from four to 24 readings per second and the inaccuracy of data had been driven down from 5-10% in the initial unit to half a percent – not bad for the early sixties. It was a remarkable technical achievement for the ARL team.
This is a picture of David with Ken Fraser looking at the two recorders, the original and the preproduction model on the right of the picture. Ken Fraser on the right was a key member of the ARL team and led the electronic development of the pre production model.
This photo compares the preproduction model with the original experimental one on the right. You can see that the level of sophistication and complexity has increased by an order of magnitude.
The Secretary to the Department of Supply then wrote to the Department of Civil Aviation to consider the future market potential of the ARL recorder, as it was now ready for production. However the process of drafting and approving the letter for his signature took six weeks and David felt the world was passing them by due to inaction and lack of interest on the part of Australia’s official bodies. An urgent request from Davalls in the UK for a commercial proposal was never answered by the commercial arm of the Department of Supply.
David however did get permission to go to the UK and assist in the transfer of technology for the first Davall flight recorder which appeared in 1963. The sales material of the time acknowledged ARL but this soon disappeared with the subsequent models. Davalls sold their first recorders to the BAE fleet who did not however want voice recording because in their words ‘investigating authorities continue to say that statements by cockpit crew under stress are unreliable’.
ARL could not have a patent for the complete recorder due to its prior publications but it did have four other provisional patent applications on specific features of the preproduction recorder. The Chief Commercial Officer of the Department of Supply decided, however, that the completion of the five patent applications into full world-wide patents could not be justified – the cost would havebeen over £2000 pounds.
This statement has been quoted as showing that the Department didn’t realise the importance, nor the value of what it had. While this was probably true, I think it is likely that these part patents would have been challenged, it would have been very hard to enforce these patents in the marketplace, and patent enforcement was an unlikely role for the Department of Supply. ARL did continue to push for some years for the patents to be pursued but in the end they were just dropped.
In 1965 Davall released its Series 1100 Red Egg magnetic wire crash recorder based on the ARL unit and with it won a large part of the British and overseas market of the time. As ARL did not have an all encompassing patent they legally owed ARL nothing, but they did make an ex gratia payment of £1000 pounds which went into Federal Government Consolidated Revenue.
In 1968 work in the area ceased at ARL as it expanded rapidly in the flight instrument companies around the world.
So ended the black box saga.
In retrospect – what should have happened? Ideally the idea would have been recognised as having sufficient merit to justify some preliminary investigation and at that time a provisional patent should have been lodged. To give the idea a fair trial, David should have been seconded to the Instruments group as its champion and the instrumentation program changed to provide resources to support David – and the combustion program should have been allowed to languish for a year or two. The objective should have been to get a practical prototype into the air as soon as possible, gain experience, develop the science and be far ahead of the world. Instead we dawdled for 11 years and did not patent before publishing.
David was always philosophical stating “our idea simply came at a time when we didn’t really need it in Australia and as soon as it was displaced overseas it took off there instead”.
After such an experience you could expect someone to be a little chastened if not crushed. This was not the David I met when I reported for work in April 1965. I found an enthusiastic innovative scientist at the top of his game looking for new fields. He had, again of his own volition, started work on high temperature fuel cells, which David recognised as having the great advantage of converting fuel directly into electricity without a heat engine and thus avoiding the Carnot inefficiency. He was the fuel chemist and I was recruited to be the mechanical engineer assisting him. We made good progress and in about a year we were getting better results than had been previously published. However, after three years the powers that be again saw no application for the work and closed it down.
Germany today is putting fuel cells into its submarines and they are likely to be used in the submarines that replace the Collins in 2030 – 2030, that is, some 70 years after David started work on them. He was again about 30 years ahead of the pack.
After fuel cells, David in the early 70s started work on alternative energy sources, their relative merits and the relative cost of electricity produced from them. As always, he was highly enthusiastic and irrepressible. He gave lectures in the laboratory, he gave lectures to learned societies, he gave lectures to lay audiences. He was passionate, visionary and presented a frank and fearless description of a future without the traditional sources of energy. He was again 30 years ahead of his time – his 1970 series of lectures on alternative energy sources would attract large audiences today as we face the future David saw so clearly all those years ago.
This is a picture of Dave with Lance Hillen examining a piece of dried Bottrycoccus Brauni, an organism that converts sunlight directly into hydrocarbons – which is now being examined in many parts of the world 30 years after David started working on it.
David always focussed on what was important. Advancing science for the betterment of mankind was what he was about, and this meant that, often, task plans, administrative procedures, time sheets and the public service way of doing things were neglected while he was hot on the scientific trail .
David was, above all, a passionate person. When talking about what he saw as important he always gave frank and fearless advice no matter who he was talking to – which often included visiting VIPs, the Director of the Laboratory, the Chief Defence Scientist, anybody .....
As a young graduate I saw that, done with respect, people appreciated frank advice and it was something I learnt from David Warren and have used throughout my career. Something you can’t learn from another person, however,is the ability to see and articulate a vision of the future, and David had that in abundance.
Recognition of his achievement came late and entirely after he had separated from ARL at the relatively young age of 58...
David was:
- Made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2002
- Awarded the Hartnett Medal of the Royal Society of the Arts
- Given the Lawrence Hargrave Award in 2001
- Awarded the Centenary Medal in 2001
- And the Institute of Energy Medal in 1999
- And Qantas has announced that it will name one of its Airbus 380s after him.
Time magazine wrote an extensive article on him in their issue of October 1999 under the heading “David Warren – with an ingenious invention, he helped make air travel safer for millions of people”.
Scientists near the end of their career often assess what they have done and what the impact their lifetime’s work has had on society. For nearly all of us the answer is ambiguous and qualified, as we are but bit players in the grand sweep of science. However for Dr David Ronald Warren AO the assessment can only be that the impact of his work was significant and important on a world scale.
Any way you want to do the sums, in a world where the volume of air travel rapidly increases but the number of deaths from aircraft accidents continues to decrease because we can now find out what causes aircraft to crash – David’s invention must have saved at least tens of thousands of lives. David is therefore in a very special class of scientists who have changed the world for the better and whose impact continues to this day, past his death and into the future. He will not be forgotten by our society.
I count myself lucky to have been his student and a friend of his.
AADI Defence Pty Ltd (www.aadidefence.com) was formally launched at an end of year and launch function held in one of the function rooms at 1 Queens Road, Melbourne, where it has its office.
Below are the addresses made to the assembled Associates and guests by two of our principals, Dr Bill Schofield and MGEN (Retd.) Jim Molan.
Bill Schofield
Ladies and gentlemen – thank you very much for coming at what was quite short notice for a launch a couple of weeks out from Christmas.
Today we are launching a company that is unique in Australia – AADI Defence Pty Ltd – which has its office on the fourth floor of this building. It is a unique company in the Australian context in that it consists of a happy band of 30 or so senior people with extensive experience and achievement in the defence sector.
This company can deliver expertise on every aspect of defence and defence industry by forming teams from its members to address specific requirements of a client:
- From our ex-military people we get knowledge of concepts of operations and how the services input into acquisition projects.
- From DSTO scientists we get the capability to evaluate defence technology and the role of DSTO in any defence purchase.
- From Defence Industry experience we can evaluate paths to market of new technology or services.
- From defence bureaucracy experience we can understand the how, when and why defence and major defence contractors buy goods and services.
The company commenced trading in July this year but as most of you know it was not a cold start up – for five years I have been involved with running a company called AADI Limited – which was a not-for-profit company doing a lot of pro bono work for small companies. It was partially financed by the Victorian government, with a quarterly grant, but the grant ceased in June this year and the not-for-profit company was no longer viable. So we decided to form AADI Defence.
I am pleased to say that in the few months since we got up and running we have had many enquiries and work covering a very wide range of goods and services that companies wish to market into the defence sector.
So we come to this launch in good spirits and very enthusiastic.
I now want to introduce one of the principals of our company, Major-General Jim Molan who as most of you would know ran the war in Iraq for some 15 memorable months and is our lead on Army concept of operations.
Jim is going to give us a short talk this evening on the Australian Army and counterinsurgency warfare.
Jim Molan
Ladies and Gentlemen
Bill thank you very much for the introduction and a Happy Christmas to you all on this, the Christmas launch of AADI Defence Pty Ltd.
Very briefly, I would like to talk about one aspect of modern warfare that may have relevance not only to the military community and strategic think-tanks, but also to us, the business community.
That aspect is that: “A modern counter insurgency campaign requires a military to be competent across the full range of military capabilities.”
I say this because modern counter insurgency is not like the Malayan Emergency or Northern Ireland but much more like Vietnam, but with a real potential to occur in any one of a range of countries. What differentiates it is that our victory in Iraq or in Afghanistan, may cause its outbreak in one or a number of other countries, such as Yemen or Somalia, or make it worse in Pakistan, or spark it up in Indonesia.
And as well, the ADF must not come out of its current concentration on counter insurgency only with a land capability middlingly competent at counter insurgency. The ADF must be able to fight as our White Papers have demanded for years that we fight, as a joint force consisting of a land force with real combat capability, a Navy based around subs and AWDs and amphibs, and an Air Force based around a JSF that works and wins, in an environment where the primacy of the US is being challenged.
I will base what I say on an interview that I gave to a magazine that was handed out at the Land Warfare Conference recently so some of you might have seen some of the ideas there. It kind of works into the themes that I heard expressed by our “captains of industry” at that conference in relation to Defence Industry as a whole and the way government runs Defence and its support for Defence Industry. The thing that I mentioned only in passing in the interview was that we are often attacked by our enemies in a way described as “asymmetrical”, but we also have asymmetry, and our asymmetry is in fact technology.
On 24 August this year, 20 of our soldiers and 20 Afghan soldiers ran into a large group (some say up to 100) Taliban and had a 3 hour fight in which a Brisbane soldier was killed. This is the second time to my knowledge we have run into a group of 100 Taliban in Uruzgan Province.
One participant in the battle wrote to a relative using social media about how the fight had not gone all that well and listed all the problems that they had. His relative, who was a Vietnam veteran, could not understand that if they had all that fire support, why could they not use it and win?
The father then sent the email to many of his veteran mates, and probably no one who received it was surprised that it finally leaked.
The question in my mind was not that the soldiers did not have enough firepower; it was always that the soldiers could not use that firepower to effect because of Rules of Engagement, because of attitude and because of a lack of familiarity with using it all together, evacuating the wounded and winning the fight at the same time.
Would it have been better I ask you, to have won that fight, to have killed or captured 100 Taliban in Uruzgan Province, and perhaps made some more enemies among that portion of the population, or to have let most of them stay victorious on that battlefield, and after a 3 hour fight, for us to withdraw and one month later, not to have gone back there again?
What do you think might have had the maximum effect on the Province? A victory as I describe, where everyone in the province would have known that if you challenge the central government troops you will lose and lose decisively, so don’t do it. Or the application of the Rules of Engagement which preserves a few lives today at the cost of possibly many tomorrow?
This is a difficult situation and we are restricted by our society’s attitude, our own morality, and our gullibility. All of these make us vulnerable to our enemies, not just psychologically, but also physically.
The answer to a large extent is technology. And of course it is technology that most of us here are concerned with, technology delivered via Australian Defence industry, or at least supported by Australian Defence industry.
Defence’s reaction to that soldier’s leaked email expressing his frustrations appeared clumsy from the outside. Defence stressed that our soldiers had enough firepower and that it was not the job of the soldiers at that time to destroy the enemy and anyhow, we will have an inquiry that will report in many months, not what it takes a real soldier about 30 seconds to decide, but what totally defuses the issue.
So the issue of that day, 24 August, is totally off the table. Just like (yet again) another study/report/investigation into Defence Industry. The Australian public, unlike the father of the soldier who was an experienced fire controller from Vietnam, could not understand the issues, and really were not that interested.
When I first received the email, without referring to it, I had written an opinion piece that said if you want to protect our soldiers and win the war in Uruzgan, two goals that I saw as quite reasonable but which are only partially accepted by the Government, then give them tanks and give them attack helicopters.
My view was that if they had enough firepower, but for good reasons they do not have the experience or the skill to use it all together with evacuating their casualties and winning the battle, then give them tanks particularly because tanks win battles and save lives without the same need to skilfully coordinate with everything around them.
Then the opposition spokesman on Defence decided to take the idea of tanks and attack helicopters directly into Parliament. Now mentioning tanks in Australia is a bit like advocating tax reform and suggesting one way to do it was by increasing GST. Immediately the media focuses on GST.
If you want to give our soldiers the ability to protect themselves and to win, and you mention tanks, the experts in the media and the commentary world immediately decide that of course you cannot use tanks in Afghanistan. Or as our PM said, tanks in Afghanistan and “guffaws” go together, and taking tanks to Afghanistan would be as silly as taking submarines to Afghanistan.
You see I wonder to this day why our PM, who deserves our respect because she is the PM, was not protected from making such an unfortunate statement on tanks by good advice from her military and civilian advisers.
Did they not know that the Danes, who are doing an extraordinary amount of counter insurgency and fighting, have tanks in Afghanistan and swear by their effectiveness?
Did they not know that the Canadians have had tanks in Kandahar for years and also swear by them, having just bought new ones from Germany just for Afghanistan?
Did they not know that whenever the UK wants tanks in Afghanistan they borrow the Canadian or Danish ones?
Did they not know that the documents that were used to justify the purchase of our 50 high quality tanks for $500m only a few years ago said exactly what I am saying now?
Did they not know that the Australian military for the last sixty years has itself resisted the use of tanks until forced to take them, and then found them priceless to not only save lives, but to win battles?
If they did not know these things then they should have known these things and they are to be condemned for not knowing them.
And how could they let our PM out on a limb like that when there was always the chance that other countries, who understand what tanks can do, might put tanks into Afghanistan and so detract more from her stature?
And of course, the US Marines two days ago rolled tanks, almost the exact same ones that we have, into Helmand province. They understand about tanks because they do this so often and are not into self delusion. As I say in the magazine article, counter insurgency requires that you be competent across all aspects of land warfare. Technology is our asymmetry.
The situation in the world at the moment is that no one, except someone as mindless as North Korea, is going to militarily challenge a super power. Current wars are “wars among the people” because our enemies are exploiting our moral approach to war and our open and moral (though sometimes naïve) societies by attacking us asymmetrically from within the people. And how do we respond. We respond through technology, and where does technology come from? From Defence industry.
The reason that we do not get the wanted response from Government on Defence Industry or on tanks is the same. It is because of a lack of knowledge of military matters that prevent government making up its own mind on military or industry matters or assessing the advice it gets, a fear of mistakes that prevents governmrnt or its officials ever taking chances, and a lack of knowledge about conflict that prevents anyone from actually preparing for war. This creates the same risk for soldiers as it creates for defence industry.
Ladies and Gentlemen, counter insurgency is heavily dependent on technology and counter insurgency is the war of the moment. Defence Industry in Australia has a role to play in counter insurgency, not just in protecting our troops but in winning the war.
And if we think that counter insurgency is tough and needs technology then think how hard it is going to be if and when the Government has to think about a war on the Korea peninsula.
Just imagine if North Korea blatantly sank a South Korean warship and shelled South Korean territory, one of our most important trade partners and a pillar of our standard living. Just imagine if our PM was talking tough to our allies about using force in our region. But, what’s that you say - this has now happened!
Our strategic thinkers have been predicting for some time that this kind of war would occur and the Defence Capability Plan is structured to allow us one day, as far away as 2030, to have the equipment to fight it. I hope that the North Koreans hang on.
And how ready do you think the ADF is to provide a meaningful joint contribution to a morally correct intervention by our allies, if they were ever to act on what our PM recommends? Does anything much that we have actually work well enough to take to war? Well, we put one observer on board a US aircraft carrier off the coast of Korea. And of course the big ticket items in the DCP continue their march, not to battle, but to the right.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have the ideas, we in AADI Defence have the facilitation, let’s do the best we can for the country, for the soldiers, sailors and airmen, and let’s do the best we can for Australian Defence Industry.
