Geoff Cooper, who has died aged 104, was an unsung hero of British aviation who wrote a definitive history of RAE Farnborough.
In 1936 he began a five-year engineering apprenticeship, finishing his final year in the main design office of the Catapult Section at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough. In 1941 he was offered a post as laboratory assistant and promoted to technical assistant grade3; when his engineering prowess was recognised, he became a leading member of the 30-strong team developing catapult-launch systems for aircraft carriers.
The Second World War and its aftermath was an era of adventure, when the aircraft carrier became established as the capital ship of the fleet; key to this dramatic progress was the technical genius of British engineers and scientists who provided the angled flightdeck, the steam catapult and the optical landing system. Cooper was at the heart of these developments which enabled carrier aviation to come of age.
Though a civilian, who never learnt to fly, Cooper flew as a passenger and observer in several catapult launches and arrested landings, and in wartime spent 134 days at sea in different ships. This included the trials of a launch rail for launching a light Auster scout aeroplane from a landing ship, when Cooper acted as human ballast to keep the tail on the rail.
On another occasion he was asked to rehearse the role of a VIP who was due to visit the next day, and landed on the carrier Pretoria Castle in gale-force winds in a Grumman Martlet. Though green with air-seasickness, Cooper performed his part without vomiting, and was taken to the wardroom and given a stiff whisky to settle his stomach, something which as a teetotaller he was unused to.
In April 1945 the Catapult Section was renamed the Naval Aircraft Department, which conducted other exotic experiments including rocket-assisted take-offs, and “wheels-up” landings on to rubberised flightdecks. Cooper was present for the first landings of an aircraft with a tricycle undercarriage, and the first twin-engined aeroplane on a British carrier.
The same year, Cooper and a colleague experimented using wooden models with the idea for an offset-angled flightdeck. Then, on December 3 1945, Cooper took instrument measurements in HMS Ocean in the Channel for the first carrier landing of a jet, a de Havilland Sea Vampire, only a few months after the last operational flight of the Navy’s venerable Fairey Swordfish biplane.
Geoffrey George John Cooper was born on March 14 1920 on the Broadlands estate in Romsey, Hampshire, where his grandparents were smallholders and his father ran the family mill engineering firm. He was educated in Farnborough, where his father took employment at the local waterworks when his engineering business went bankrupt.
After the war, Cooper took up engineering roles with the Ministry of Works, and in 1960 became principal engineer at the National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock in Farnborough. There he tested Olympus engines for the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde; he would be summoned from his home four miles away by the roar of the engines starting up.
In 1967 he transferred to the Institute of Aviation Medicine, also at Farnborough. He was in charge of the centrifuge, where jet pilots and doctors learnt to deal with extreme G-forces. His last career move was to the building research establishment at Garston in Hertfordshire as head of works engineering until he retired in 1985.
A committed Christian, Cooper was a self-taught organist and secretary of the Organ Club for more than 20 years, and toured the country to play on different organs: his favourite music was Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G Minor. He was the regular organist at the Farnborough Baptist church and later at St Mary’s, Watford, both with fine mid-19th-century organs; he helped to maintain the former (often bringing organ pipes home for overhaul on the dining table), and rebuild the latter in 1989.
His son, Paul, a pupil at Farnborough Grammar School, recalled that on one occasion he was ordered to write lines as punishment for forgetting his football kit, and used the back of a piece of scrap paper from his father’s desk, only to find his games master, who also taught maths, absorbed by the contents on the front. Though it was marked “TOP SECRET” Cooper told his son not to worry – it was complex mathematics to do with the aerodynamics of some long-cancelled Cold War jet.
Cooper maintained a passionate interest in aviation, and after his son Peter had written Forever Farnborough: Flying the Limits 1904-96 (1996) and Farnborough: 100 Years of British Aviation (2006), Cooper himself wrote Farnborough and the Fleet Air Arm (2008), an encyclopaedic history of the development of naval aviation at Farnborough from the early years of the 20th century. Cooper’s book, while technical, is highly readable and filled with historic photographs, and diagrams, some of them his own. Possessed of an extraordinary memory, Cooper was interviewed on film by researchers only last year.
He became a chartered engineer and was a member of the Institutes of Mechanical, Electrical, Heating and Ventilation Engineers and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He met his first wife, Dora May Dean, at school. She worked at the Air Ministry in Aldwych and was injured in June 1944 when Adastral House was hit by a V-1 flying bomb, killing some 200. Dora was hit by flying glass, and Cooper recalled meeting her off the train, her blood-stained coat shimmering with shards of glass embedded in it. They married later that year, but after a long illness, nursed by him, she died in 1966.
Geoff Cooper married, secondly, in 1967, Irene Anne Smith, who survives him. There were two sons of each marriage: Peter followed him into the RAE as an apprentice and retired as an aviation insurance loss adjuster and author; Paul was a commercial and finance director; Andrew is a specialist sound engineer with Yamaha; Timothy, a nuclear physicist, predeceased him in 2006.
Geoff Cooper, born March 14 1920, died May 6 2024
