It is my sad duty to report that my dear friend Roger Sturgess passed away on Thursday. Roger was a very highly accomplished aircraft structures and rocket propulsion engineer, who had started at DeHavilland aircraft in the 1950's as an apprentice, working his way up to a structure stress and materials engineer.... a "stressman" as he used to say. In addition to DH, I believe I remember hearing he had worked at Hawker Siddeley, Boeing, Lockheed, Rocketdyne, JPL, and more.
He had become the "Engineer Emeritus" in the Formula One air racing organization, his opinion carrying enough weight to allow or disallow an aircraft from being permited to race with a nod. I'm only here to write this because he gave a friendly nod to the race organization that he wasn't sure my airplane was all "sorted" one year. After retirement from full-time engineering he kindly offered to help designers, modifiers, and tinkerers like me with their aircraft projects.
Rog valiantly tried to transfer as much of his engineering knowledge and experience to me as he could, somehow working around my lack of formal education and mathematic skills. He found a way to translate the principles of how structures work, how stress and load travels through an airframe... into spoken instructions and beginner-level sketches. He gave me the gift not only of access to his knowledge, but enough of an understanding of how things work so I had a chance to absorb a small percentage of what he was explaining.
Whenever anyone asked me to defend how an uneducated balsa wood model builder had the gall to design a component or sketch out a repair, I would always smile and say "the guy who told me I could make it out of .040" instead of .063... you're not physically strong enough to lift his resume off the table".
Thank you for being one of the treasures of my life Rog.
He had become the "Engineer Emeritus" in the Formula One air racing organization, his opinion carrying enough weight to allow or disallow an aircraft from being permited to race with a nod. I'm only here to write this because he gave a friendly nod to the race organization that he wasn't sure my airplane was all "sorted" one year. After retirement from full-time engineering he kindly offered to help designers, modifiers, and tinkerers like me with their aircraft projects.
Rog valiantly tried to transfer as much of his engineering knowledge and experience to me as he could, somehow working around my lack of formal education and mathematic skills. He found a way to translate the principles of how structures work, how stress and load travels through an airframe... into spoken instructions and beginner-level sketches. He gave me the gift not only of access to his knowledge, but enough of an understanding of how things work so I had a chance to absorb a small percentage of what he was explaining.
Whenever anyone asked me to defend how an uneducated balsa wood model builder had the gall to design a component or sketch out a repair, I would always smile and say "the guy who told me I could make it out of .040" instead of .063... you're not physically strong enough to lift his resume off the table".
Thank you for being one of the treasures of my life Rog.
