An utterly trustworthy engineering legend in record breaking (and myriad other) endeavours, John Ackroyd played a crucial role when Richard Noble’s Thrust2 regained the land speed record for Britain in 1983 Some of the best things that happened to our friend Ackers, who died aged 83 of complications arising from Alzheimer’s disease on January 25th, occurred while he was on the beach in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. That was where he met Birgit Haggman in 1963; they went on to marry and have two children, Anna and Lisa. It was also where he was doing deckchair attendant service, his regular occupation when he was in one of his frequent periods between contract design jobs, when in 1977 he happened to read a copy of Cars and Car Conversions, better known by car buffs as Triple C. There he saw the advertisement of the search that land speed record aspirant Richard Noble had launched for a ‘650 mph car designer.’ Typically, Noble had saved the cost of placing an advert by cleverly circulating a press release to all the motoring mags. Such an exciting ultimate challenge was exactly what appealed most to the man who had been born to a military family in India’s Mathura region where, as a little boy looking skyward, he had first seen an aeroplane and formulated the dream to design such things when he grew up. Ackers was a slide rule, pen and paper sort of designer, a complete pragmatist who could turn his hand, and a razor sharp engineering mind, to any project. His past embraced apprenticeship at Saunders-Roe where he worked on the SR53 rocket-jet fighter, a brief sojourn at ERA, working on the Cushioncraft CCS hovercraft, a spell with Dornier, and collaborating on one of the earliest electric cars, the Enfield 8000. Then it wasofftoAudi,anotherspellwithJohn Goulandris’ Enfield project, this time in Greece, more time as a deckchair attendant, then a job at Britten Norman working on the Trislander aircraft. According to John it took several calls to reach Richard, who was busy, busy, busy, but said he would arrange for him to be interviewed by Ken Norris, that superb man who had designed Donald Campbell’s hyper-successful Bluebird K7 hydroplane which set the water speed record on no fewer than seven occasions, and his wheel-driven land speed-breaking CN7 car. When Richard got round to calling Ken to set up an appointment for Ackers to visit, Ken told him wryly, “He’s been here since nine o’clock.” Of course, he got the job. Fate had a way of blessing Richard with such bouts of serendipity, for this one would not be the last. Perhaps it was Fate’s way oftryingtooffsetthefrustrationthat so often lay in wait Ackers summarised what he had learned of the project from Richard and Ken very simply at this stage: “We had one Rolls-Royce Avon 210 engine with reheat. But we had nowhere to build the car, no materials or components, no tools, no team, no experience and no money. At least that meant we could start with a clean sheet of paper.” He thus took a job working for Porsche on its Project SAVE ambulance as Noble sought funding, but used the German manufacturer’s library to its fullest in his lunchtime research into land speed cars. And the moment Richard could offer him a modest stipend he swapped Porsche’s elegant offices for the kitchen of a derelict waterside house in the same Ranalagh works at Fishbourne on the Isle of Wight in which he had worked for Enfield. There he happily locked himself away to embark on his greatest challenge yet. One might say, without wishing to seem disrespectful of either man, that the resultant Thrust2 was a tidied- up version of Art Arfons three-time record-holding Green Monster, which had, after all, only cost Art $10,000 to put together. At that time there were two feasible concepts: driver ahead of jet engine, which meant a long, slim car; or driver alongside jet, which conveniently facilitated a second cockpit for a lucky passenger. Art - and Ackers - favoured the latter because, as Ackers explained, “it put the four wheels at each corner for a steady platform, the driver in the middle for safety, and the engine weight forward for stability.” His meticulous attention to detail created a very refined car. Those who knew diddly squat about land speed vehicles might sneakily deride its blocky shape and relatively short length and broad width, but once the suspension settings and aluminium wheels had been sorted out after some interesting slides approaching 350 mph at Bonneville in 1981, and a weather- aborted attempt after the switch from salt to the playa desert at Black Rock in Nevada’s Gerlach in 1982, Noble took Thrust2 to a new record of 638.468 mph on October 4th, 1983. And there the mark stood until his own ThrustSSC broke it on September 25th, 1997, at 714.144 mph, in Andy Green’s capable hands, prior to the famed supersonic 763.035 mph success that October. I remember the day at Bonneville in ’81 when they were adjusting the rake of Thrust2 by cutting an inch or so out of the rear suspension struts. Ackers was supervising the work, as Richard watched with increasing concern etching itself into his expression. Eventually he could contain himself no longer. “Christ, John, is it going to be safe welding them back together again?” Ackers’ boyish face broke into its habitually cheery grin. “Of course it Richard. How else do you think the rest of this thing is held together?” The two of them went on to forge a hugely successful relationship, and when it came to the crunch in 1983, Richard trusted Ackers enough literally to put his life in his hands with the final mechanical change they made to the set-up. Up to 623mph they had always run Thrust2 with zero rake. Now, noting how the four-tonne car was tending to plough into the playa surface, Ackers advised reducing the total download of 6360 lbs over the front wheels (5760 of it static weight) by giving the car 0.17 degrees of nose-up incidence. At 650 mph, that would give the car 2040 lbs of positive lift at the front. But there would still be 3720 lbs of static weight acting to balance that out and prevent the car from doing a backflip. That, and sundry minor changes worked the oracle as Noble sped one way at 624.241 mph after starting on the poorest track surface, and returned at 642.971 mph to cement the return of the land speed record to Britain for the first time since 1964. And on that fastest run, Thrust2 peaked at... 650.88 mph, its ultimate target speed. For neither man would that prove to be the end. Noble went on to his Atlantic Sprinter boat and ARV light aircraft projects, then ThrustSSC and Bloodhound SSC. Peripatetic as ever, and now sadly divorced from Birgit, Ackers got involved briefly with ARV and then Julian Nott’s Endeavour round-the-world balloon project, then worked with Sammy Miller as he sought to better his 247 mph ice speed record with the Vanishing Point 2002/R rocket-powered funny car. I recall a happy telephone conversation with him from upstate New York before Sammy took the receiver and finally admitted that my 200 mph shunt at Santa Pod in 1982 in that car was due to somebody forgetting to tighten the pinch bolt linking the steering column to the steering rack. From 1987 Ackers became very heavily involved in Per Linstrand’s Atlantic ballooning aspirations, working closely with the Swedish entrepreneur and his partner Richard Branson of Virgin. The resultant Virgin Atlantic Flyer was created in Linstrand’s Thunder & Colt factory in Oswestry and on July 2nd that year it set off from Maine and landed 31 hours and 41 minutes later at Limavady, in County Londonderry having become the first hot-air balloon successfully to cross the Atlantic. That attempt ended dramatically, however, with both Linstrand and Branson swimming in the Irish Sea after a hair- raising time when the capsule was dragged through the water; Linstrand was ejected first and spent an hour in the freezing sea, while Branson escaped after the balloon briefly took off again before ejecting him. Ackers then joined Linstrand again on the quest to go through the tropopause to the stratosphere by eclipsing Nott’s 1980 record of 55,034 feet. On July 6th, 1988, Linstrand succeeded with a new record of 64,997 feet in his Stratoquest balloon. That led to the Linstrand/Branson Pacific Flyer project to cross the Pacific Ocean, with the largest hot air balloon ever made up to that point. Failure in 1989 sent John to work briefly with Airship Industries on the Westinghouse ‘Sentinel’ airship, but just as that deal went bust Pacific Flyer was revived and he made a seamless return. After a flight filled with drama, Linstrand and Branson touched down on January 17th 1991 after setting new records for the longest and fastest balloon flights, having successfully ridden the jetstream at almost 200 mph. Their journey from Japan to Canada saw them survive a fire on the capsule’s dome, and a landing on a frozen lake in the Canadian Barrens 236 miles north of Yellowknife, which itself was 600 miles south of Edmonton. The 6761-mile trip took 48 hours 6 minutes, and was accomplished at an average speed of 146.7 mph. Ackers would later return to the land speed record, working with the legendary Craig Breedlove in his rival effort to ThrustSSC with Spirit of America – Sonic Arrow in the 1997 race to go supersonic; on Steve Fossett’s stillborn project with the same car; with the inestimable Rosco McGlashan’s Aussie Invader projects; and Richard Brown’s Gillette Mach 3 Challenger rocket motorcycle. He also had drawn up his own wheel-driven lsr contender, Activator, which remained a paper project after Don Vesco’s 458 mph success in 2001. I’d tried to get him interested in my Restless Spirit water speed record programme in 1984, but though John was never less than gentlemanly in all his dealings, getting him to do something he didn’t really want to do (he was worried about his lack of knowledge of hydrodynamics) was like dragging a horse to water. A shame, as him working on structure, systems and aerodynamics, while Lorne Campbell looked at hydrodynamics, would have been a powerful combination. Both were designers with the greatest integrity, to whom the safety of the man in the cockpit was always of paramount importance. Interestingly, though, he did once grab me to tell me about his latest observation. “Dave, I was sitting outside the office the other day and noticed how calm the water was where the ropes that section off the moorings just touched its surface. If we could somehow rope off the entire course longitudinally, it ought to be possible to keep the surface as calm as possible between them...” He did later work with Nigel MacKnight’s Quicksilver wsr programme, designing its first spaceframe chassis, but quit in disgust over the callous way in which project mentor Ken Norris was treated. Ballooning still exerted a strong pull and he was once again heavily involved with Linstrand in the race to become the first to circumnavigate the globe non-stop by balloon. Despite the tragic death of friend and fellow engineer Alex Ritchie in a parachuting accident in January 1998 the team pushed on in his name, and Ackers was working flat-out on a new, bigger Linstrand challenger when victory for the Breitling Orbiter 3 piloted by Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones finally brought the great race to its end on March 21st, 1999. Was there ever a design engineer who operated in so many genres, or who contributed so much to so many myriad projects? His cv would rival Reid Railton’s. Ackers’ genius lay not just in the uncompromising integrity of his processes, but in that offbeat ability, such as with those mooring ropes and a water speed run, to think laterally and to see in things we all saw their true potential value. No wonder he once drew up “a design proposal that was intimately linked with astronaut relief and zero gravity,” for the Vienna-based European Space Agency’s mooted Hermes Spaceplane. This was the Human Waste Collection Assembly, or HWCA. His first reaction was that it was not the most glamorous part of the programme, but he realised it was a fascinating and vital aspect of manned spaceflight. “No loo, no go!” With sufficient suction to defy gravity, the HWCA would later be employed invariousspacecraft,doubtlesstothe astronauts’ great relief... In between all this he also worked on Larry Newman and Tim Lachenmeier’s innovative but ultimately unsuccessful Earthwinds balloon dream; helped the commercial operation at various locations of the Linstrand HiFlyer balloon that he had designed in in 1996; found time to help Keith Brading in his local project recreating better versions of the famed ‘Frogeye’ Austin Healey Sprites; and restored Donald Campbell’s Jetstar, a different kind of jetboat to the Bluebird K7 in which the speedking had been killed on Coniston Water back at the start of 1967. Ackers was ever a free spirit, a jeans a tee-shirt rather than an evening dress sort of guy. What you saw was what you got, but where James Hunt effected similar dress sense, Ackers did it without wishing to cock a snook at the Establishment. It was simply what he was happiest wearing. That or jeans, shirt, and a colourful bandana. He wasn’t one for frills or any sort of airs and graces. Who else would happily have accepted that his company car during the Thrust2 days was the 1927 Hercules bike he had bought for £1.50 back in 1953 while apprenticed at Saunders-Roe, or that he had to ride it six miles to get any photocopying done, or to grab a handful of change whenever he needed to ring Noble from the nearest public callbox? He and Birgit remained friends, and as he began a new life in which he embraced grandfatherhood with Moza and Luca, and lived with Meryel Boyd, he remained slim and fit and the youthful deckchair attendant reappeared now and then with an impromptu display of break-dancing, before the sad onset of dementia persuaded him that it was better to retire than risk compromising safety by forgetting or overlooking something crucial. Ackers was warm, funny, happily talkative with one and all, and a man unspoiled by vanity or self- aggrandisement. One of those very rare guys you are sometimes blessed to meet in life whose friendship was a precious gift you treasured with pride and joy in equal measure, and whose passing evokes deep sorrow.