Designing the Hovercraft: Ron Ballantyne

 

Ron Ballantyne is a Professional Engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. He talked about designing the Sidewall Hovercraft, a prototype developed in the 1960s. This "air lubricated" vehicle was something new whose concept came from the floating Hoover vacuum cleaner. Ron walked the club through a stream of management vs engineer development issues that always came back to the fact that the engineer was right.