Ferranti: Defense Electronics

During World War II, Ferranti became a major supplier of electronics, fuses, valves, and was, through development of the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system, heavily involved in the early development of radar in the United Kingdom.

In 1943 Ferranti opened a factory at Crewe Toll in Edinburgh to manufacture Gyro Gunsights for the Spitfire aircraft. After the war this business (Ferranti Scotland) would grow to employ 8,000 staff in 8 locations, becoming the birth place of the Scottish electronics industry's.

From 1949, Ferranti assisted the Canadian Navy develop DATAR (Digital Automated Tracking and Resolving).

In the 1950s work focused on the development of airborne radar with the company subsequently supplying radars to most of the UK's fast jet and helicopter fleets: today the Crewe Toll site (now owned by SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems)

In the 1960s and 1970s Inertial Navigation became an important product line for the company with systems designed for fast jet (Harrier, Tornado), Space and Land applications.

In 1970 Ferranti became involved in the sonar field through its involvement with Plessey in a new series of sonar's, for which designed and built the computer subsystems.

In 1987 Ferranti purchased International Signal and Control (ISC), a Pennsylvania based defense contractor.[22]

In 1989 the Serious Fraud Office started criminal investigation regarding alleged massive fraud at ISC. In December 1991 James Guerin, founder of ISC and co-Chairman of the merged company, pleaded guilty before the federal court in Philadelphia to fraud committed both in the USA and UK.

Design drafting: upon completing my apprenticeship, I was posted to the Test Equipment Group where I both design layout work and produced the detail drawings for test equipment for the Laser Rangefinder and Marked Target Seeker (LRMTS) for the Jaguar and Harrier fleets, and later for Tornado. The design work was primarily mechanical, working to very close tolerances (+/- 0.0001inch)

This was an interesting time in industry as the country had just began the process of converting to the metric system so many of the programs were a mix of imperial and and metric

I also did layout work for printed circuit boards which were primarily double-sided PCB using a process called 'computer aided design', The board layout and tracks (traces) were drawn, manually, on a drafting board using a red pencil for the solder side and blue pencil for the component side and the manufacturing tapes for the Gerber photo plotter were produced using a manual digitizing process to created BCD tapes. Oh, how technology has changed!

All of my drafting work was manually produced on a drafting board, CAD systems were being slowly introduced during the early mid-80s.

In 1985, the chief engineer, decided that I could better used elsewhere than in drawing office; and I was promoted to the position of Mechanical Engineer within the Flight Trials unit.

Flight trials was very much a skunk works organization, left to their own devices to produce airborne test-equipment for prototype attack/surveillance radars (Blue Vixen and Blue Kestrel). The flight test beds which comprised of a BAE HS-125, BAC-111 (seen above, I am second from the right, at RAE Bedford, England) and a Sea King helicopter. This was a 'end-to-end' role - solve the design problem, generate the design, create the details drawings, supervise manufacturing and assembly, perform the electrical test and commission the equipment. Do whatever it took to get the job done.

During this time Ferranti would receive milestone payments from the government and it would not be unusual for my team to work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, to ensure that our milestones were met.

It became apparent very quickly that I needed to be schooled in Electronics and went to West Lothian Technical College (3 nights a week) for two years to obtain a SCOTVEC certificate in Electrical and Electronic Engineering ( I won the college award for being top student). My responsibilities grew from solely just the mechanical and cable assembly design, to the electrical design of the control equipment.

Much of the equipment I designed was used in non-benign environments from helicopters to Typhoon wing-pod test equipment performing up to 60G in highly stressful testing environments. During this time, I spent one-year based at RAE Bedford operating as a flight trials observer where I would fly 2 to 3 sorties per week operating the very equipment that I designed.