Rear-admiral Mike Simpson
Gifted naval aero-engineer who began his career on the lower decks and rose to flag rank
REAR-ADMIRAL MIKE SIMPSON, who has died aged 89, enjoyed a 54-year career in aero-engineering, rising from the lower deck to flag rank, and then to chairman of a major international company.
Simpson relished the challenges of command, and his views were always thoughtful. He was the commodore superintendent of the Royal Navy Aircraft Yard, Fleetlands, in 1979-80, and reached the pinnacle of his specialisation as a rear-admiral and Director General Aircraft (Navy) (1982-85). His experience led him to see engineering as being as much about logistics as anything else – ensuring that the supply chain provided the necessary spares for front-line engineers.
Michael Frank Simpson was born on September 27 1928 to a naval family at Keynsham, Bath. His father died when he was eight and he was brought up by his mother, under the influence of his older brother, Robert, whom he hero-worshipped.
Educated at King Edward’s School, Bath, he had hoped to follow Robert into the Physics stream and on to Oxford, became bored when he was relegated to the Latin stream, and instead, aged 15, joined the wartime Navy, only to find himself subject to four years’ intense academic and practical training at HMS Condor, Arbroath, to become an artificer apprentice.
In 1948 Simpson arrived at HMS Hornbill at Culham, near Abingdon, and found himself in a personal heaven, free of classes. There was rugby and rowing as well as sailing and local friendships, pubs on the Thames and Saturday night dances at the Corn Exchange.
In his first ship, the carrier Vengeance, as leader of the flight deck “crash party” (1950-52), Simpson watched hundreds of deck landings over a 15-month period, rescuing aircrew and clearing away the debris of many accidents, ever conscious that Robert had been killed while landing on another carrier two years before.
He was also twice tried for summary offences. On the first occasion he was shown leniency on a charge of leave-breaking, but on the second, on a charge of drunkenness, his papers as an officer candidate were ordered to be torn up. Due to an administrative error, however, the papers had already left the ship and the chief writer (clerk) agreed to remain silent, in return for Simpson’s daily tot of rum.
After eight years on the lower deck, Simpson was promoted to sublieutenant and was appointed to the Royal Naval Engineering College, Manadon, where he passed out in 1956 with a First. Seagoing air engineering tasks were interspersed with desk jobs, his key appointments including: as air engineer on 728 Naval Air Squadron, the amphibious warfare trials unit, equipped with Whirlwind helicopters in 1957; with a Royal Marines helicopter force during the Cyprus emergency; with the US Navy on the Pacific coast during the Vietnam War; and air engineer of the carrier Ark Royal (1971-72).
During the Falklands War he was commodore of the barracks in Portsmouth and aided the British cause by befriending the Chilean naval attaché Sergio Cabezas Dufeu.
He was appointed CB on leaving the Navy in 1985, when he was interviewed for a senior position at Hunting Aviation. Assuming that his interviewer, the managing director, was also a qualified engineer, Simpson let rip about “the dreadful pilots, who ponced around in the skies, and left all the real work to [his] noble engineers”. Only afterwards did his interviewer tell him: “By the way, during my National Service in the Fleet Air Arm, I was one of those poncey pilots!” Nevertheless Simpson got the job, and in 1992 he became worldwide chairman of Hunting Aviation Engineering, before retiring in 1998.
His judgment and guidance was sought by many, including the Society of British Aerospace Companies, where he was a director and council member (1994-98).
At Culham in the late 1940s he helped restore an old boat, and later fitted out his own motorsailer, Key West, which he used on cross-channel visits. For many years he drove a Rolls-royce, registration number MS 86. He published widely in engineering and aviation journals and, in 2013, an autobiography, The View from Below: Memoir of an Aircraft Artificer 1949/51.
Simpson was an engaging conversationalist with an impressive depth of knowledge of a wide variety of subjects. He never lost his good looks.
He married, first, in 1958, Pamela Bertram (dissolved 1971), and secondly Sandra Drury (née Clift) in 1972. She survives him with two children of the first and one of the second marriage.
Earlier this year he was knocked from a scooter on Bali, and despite Sandra’s determined efforts to repatriate her husband to London, his head injuries proved fatal.