Lieutenant-commander Doug Taylor
Naval engineer whose vision of a ‘ski-jump’ take-off for fighter jets helped to win the Falklands War
LIEUTENANT-COMMANDER DOUG TAYLOR, who has died aged 89, saw the development of all the postwar innovations in the Royal Navy which made modern naval aviation possible, the steam catapult, the angled deck, the projector sight, high-energy arresting gear – and, the last of them, Taylor’s ski-jump.
In September 1964, on a day of almost unbearable tropical heat, Taylor was flight deck engineer officer of the carrier HMS Victorious which, under international law, was exercising her right of innocent passage through the Lombok Strait into the Java Sea.
Victorious was at action stations, ready to intervene on behalf of newly independent Malaysia in the confrontation with Indonesia, when Taylor’s sixth sense caused him to examine the steam catapults where Sea Vixen fighters and Buccaneer bombers were at standby. Shocked, he realised that the aircraft could not be launched because the deck had expanded so much in the heat that the catapults were jammed.
Summoned to the bridge to explain the problem, his captain laconically told him, “Bad luck, Doug. Fix it as soon as you can. Radar shows there’s a lot of enemy air activity”.
Taylor had already ordered the deck around the catapults to be cooled by hosing with seawater: the deck shrank and the catapults quickly returned to working order, but the 10 minutes which the incident lasted led to Taylor’s vision of “a runway in the sky” for the new generation of vertical take-off Sea Harrier fighters.
The postwar Fleet Air Arm had evolved, mostly unnoticed by the public, and despite government parsimony, into one of the most highly motivated and efficient air forces in the world, but Taylor thought that it had reached the limits of expansion. He worked on alternative forms of short take-off from ships as small as frigates, but his idea of a sausage-like, rapidly inflated catapult was derided as the “giant condom”.
However, over Christmas 1969 using a slide-rule, he began a series of laborious calculations concerning launches along a ramp which would impart ballistic energy to an aircraft.
This idea was slow to overcome the “risibility factor” until Rear-admiral Edward Dyer-smith, Director-general Aircraft (Naval) from 1970 until 1972, took an interest and, to give Taylor and his ideas academic credibility, arranged for him to read for an Mphil at Southampton University.
There, under Professor Ian Cheeseman, Taylor gained access to one of the university’s early computers, “about the size of a large garden shed”, and was able to prove his theory that an upward-curving ramp could impart significant vertical velocity to an aircraft at the end of a short, running take-off.
Established thinking by boffins and senior officers in the RN and the RAF was heavily prejudiced against Taylor’s ideas, but anger at their closed minds only made him more determined. He won round John Fozard, chief designer at Hawkers, the makers of the Harrier, and John Farley, the Chief Test Pilot, who became his advocates.
Fozard described the ski-jump – cheap, with no moving parts, and simple – as a rare “win-win”, and the trials which began in August 1977 were a total success.
Eventually HMS Invincible, lead ship of a new class of small carriers, was fitted with a 7-degree ramp and on October 30 1980, test pilot Lieutenant-commander David Poole from Boscombe Down made the first Sea Harrier launch from a ski-jump at sea. Later, all three Invincible-class carriers were fitted with 12-degree ramps.
The ski-jump would change the shape of the Royal Navy’s carrier fleet and play a decisive role in winning the Falklands War. Later ski-jumps were to be fitted in many other navies’ carriers.
Taylor’s rewards were the bronze medal of the James Clayton Memorial Prize of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Royal Aeronautical Society and the James Martin gold medal of the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators, the MBE, and an interim payment of £25,000 by the Ministry of Defence. A full payment was never made.
Douglas Richard Taylor was born at Tunbridge Wells on May 5 1929. Both his parents had left school aged 13 to enter domestic service, but young Douglas won a place to Dartford Grammar School.
After his headmaster discouraged him from applying for a wartime place at Dartmouth, as he thought the youngster would fail at interview, he entered the Navy as an artificer apprentice in 1945. The Navy recognised Taylor’s potential and three years later sent him to the RN Engineering College, Keyham, as a cadet.
Taylor’s first invention, aged 11, was a design for an opposed-piston two-stroke engine, but though he invented and modified machinery throughout his life, he recognised that he could not making his living by inventions. He was also a superb engineer, gifted with an instinctive sense for a problem and its solution: he called it “funny feelings”; his bosses called it “working magic”.
He retired from the Navy aged 50 to become a consultant engineer at GEC Avionics (1979–1995). He never lost his manual dexterity or his interest in making things, and maintained his own car until electronic technology made this impossible, and kept a well-equipped workshop where he continued to experiment with sundry inventions until late in life.
Earlier this year he was sketching out a new aircraft design – although to his irritation, his calculations began to suggest that it would never fly – and writing notes for a lecture to be given to engineering students at Cambridge. He was also an accomplished landscape painter.
He took up flying in his late seventies and flew solo for a decade, and self-published his naval memoir, A Runway in the Sky, in 2015.
Taylor married Iris Leek in 1955. She survives him with their son and daughter.
Lieutenant-commander Douglas Taylor, born May 5 1929, died March 12 2019