John Scott — a life spent looking to the skies
Aircraft engineer John Scott, who has died aged 82, was, by his own admission, fascinated by Stanley Kubrick’s Sci-fi movie 2001 A Space Odyssey.
He never missed a chance to see Kubrick’s nearly 3-hour meditation, released in 1968, on the dawning of the age of space flight and what it might mean for the evolution of humankind.
Son Martin said John, who at the time lived in England, drove great distances to see the film when it was first screened.
‘‘Every opportunity it was on he would always go to see the film at the cinema in both England or in Hamilton or Auckland.
By the time I was 12 I’d seen the film about eight times with John.’’
The movie dovetailed with John’s lifelong interest in aircraft and a career that spanned continents and involved everything from working in England on a top secret experimental Cold War supersonic bomber to a crop duster aircraft in Hamilton.
His life’s work culminated in the invention and patenting in Wellington of a tube launch system for putting spaceships into orbit.
John grew up the only child of an impoverished solo mother in the Lancashire city of Blackburn.
His mother Winifred was determined to help her son better himself, escorting him to libraries, political meetings, and the movies, where the young John was intrigued by another Sci-fi adventurer, Flash Gordon, and his battles with Ming the Merciless, the ruler of the planet
Mongo. The movie inspired John’s interest in flying machines and at age 15 he signed up for the Royal Air Force’s boy entrant scheme and was assigned to the air school at RAF Cosford in Shropshire.
Three years later, as a qualified aircraft engineer, the teenage John, now a corporal, was assigned to RAF Station Celle in Lower Saxony.
The airbase had served a vital role in the Berlin airlift, but John’s time there was spent servicing the De Havilland Venom fighter bomber.
Further postings followed to RAF Davidstow Moor in Cornwall (where he worked on the long-range maritime patrol aircraft the Avro Shackleton), and Northern Ireland.
A fan of the Doc Martin television series, John’s time in Cornwall meant he had an intimate knowledge of Port Isaac, the setting for the fictional Portwenn in the series.
In later life in Hamilton he never tired of pointing out he had parked his motorbike outside the series’ village shop while visiting a girlfriend.
John’s second big move came when he left the RAF to join the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) as an aircraft fitter in Warton, Lancashire.
He advanced swiftly through the managerial levels, rising to be a methods engineer responsible for planning on the top secret TSR-2 supersonic bomber (which never went into production) and later the Tornado fighter, which was taken out of service by the RAF just last year.
In 1964 he met Liverpudlian Patricia
‘‘Every opportunity it was on he would always go to see the film at the cinema . . . by the time I was 12 I’d seen the film about eight times with John’’
Son Martin on his father’s love of the cinema
Connor while on a day trip to Blackpool on his favourite motorbike, a Norton Dominator.
Fortunately, Pat liked bikes and the two rode throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire on adventures.
After marrying they settled down to village life, welcoming sons Adrian and Martin, while John commuted in his new Vauxhill Viva.
The working-class Blackburn boy had made his way into the comfortable, skilled middle classes.
However, by the early ’70s the couple, with a watchful eye on the declining British aircraft industry, started to look around. John’s skills were in great demand and he received job offers from SAAB in Sweden, Avro in Canada, as well as aircraft firms in Melbourne, Munich, and Cape Town, before discovering an advertisement for Aerospace in Hamilton.
The family travelled to Manchester University to watch a NZ Government immigration film and presentation, liked what they saw and heard, and settled on the move.
John arrived in Hamilton in 1973 and the family settled into a home in Fairview Downs, while John went back on the tools on Pacific Aerospace’s factory floor, working on the company’s newly launched CT4 Air Trainer.
He soon rose to sales manager at the company, arranging the refurbishment contracts for the RNZAF’s Skyhawk fighters and Aermacchi jet trainers.
He was with Pacific Aerospace for more than 20 years, travelling on business to the United States and Italy, before deciding in 1996, and now in his ‘60s, to once again go back on the tools, this time for Air New Zealand’s engineering services in Manukau.
Martin said John’s life had centred on his tools.
‘‘He really enjoyed his tools and had a double garage filled with them.
If the occasion warranted it, he would design and make his own, turning them out on a lathe.
He was the sort of man who took his car engine apart simply because he enjoyed doing it.’’
A member of Royal Aeronautical Society, he retired in the early 2000s to his Dinsdale home to tinker on his idea for a spaceship launcher, which he patented in 2012 with the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand (Iponz).
John’s proposed method for launching orbital payloads used a launch system comprising of magnetic levitation, linear electric propulsion, and a 23-kilometre vacuum launch tube.
The system was never built, but the patent was enough for John, evidence of a life spent engineering, and dreaming about, the possibilities of flight.
John was the husband of Patricia (deceased); father of Martin and Adrian(deceased); and granddad of Bon.