Jetrader - March/April 2010 - 8

Q&A ISTAT’s 2010 Gil Speed, President, Gil Speed & Associates, Inc. Jetrader: How did you initially get interested in aviation? Gil Speed: I was born [in Bristol, England] in 1933, and I was there during the war, during the blitzes; Bristol was pretty badly bombed because of the aircraft facilities and the docks. Bristol Airplane Company was a major aircraft operation in those days, it’s now part of British Aerospace and Airbus; I suppose I got interested in airplanes because of what I saw during the war and also the fact that there were airplanes being manufactured in Bristol. J: How did that interest translate into a career in aviation? GS: I went to boarding school, and I was drafted into the Royal Air Force (RAF) at age 18 when we had to serve a twoyear compulsory service. In the RAF, I got involved in maintenance and operations manuals as a technical clerk. I was posted to a Coastal Command unit in Kinloss, Scotland with a squadron that had Lockheed Neptune aircraft. I dealt with the U.S. OEM service reps and their engineering people keeping the manuals and other technical documents up to date. I became interested in the design and maintenance of airplanes at that point. During my time in Scotland, I started attending the College of Technology at Elgin. When I came out of the [Royal Air Force], I became a student-apprentice at the Bristol Airplane Company and after that a design engineer, working on the Viscount at British Aerospace in Bournemouth for two years. There, I got involved with American customers, dealing with Capital Airways and other potential U.S. buyers. I became enthusiastic about the way the U.S. airlines appeared to handle their operations and make decisions. I decided I would like to work in the operating environment rather than design and manufacturing. The British airlines at that time were nationalized, and I didn’t particularly want to work for a government organization. So, I decided to come to the United States and work for an airline here. Things were pretty bad in England in 1957. This was right after the Suez crisis and people were leaving England in droves. It was easy to get into the U.S. as an engineer. I was very lucky, because I had an introduction to Captain Eddie Rickenbacker at Eastern Airlines. I went in to see them and got a job with Charlie Froesch, who was the vice president of engineering. He had come to the U.S. as an immigrant after WWI and was interested in how I turned up without a job. Suddenly, I had my own ofﬁce overlooking the skating rink in Rockefeller Center. J: What types of projects were you involved with? GS: I spent the next two years making interior-seating layouts of DC-8s and Electras, which were coming into service and also Convair 880s, Viscounts and others that Eastern didn’t buy. ATA 100 came into being at that time, which I thought was a major step forward in technical manuals. Lockheed reluctantly adopted it for the Electra. I proposed that the ATA 100 chapter titles be used for the engineering ﬁling system. Charlie thought that was a brilliant idea and gave me the job of making it happen. This year, ISTAT is proud to announce that Gil Speed is the recipient of the prestigious ISTAT Award, presented each year at the ISTAT Annual Conference. Gil has been in the aviation industry for more than half a century, and in that time, he’s gotten to work alongside some of the biggest names in the industry on numerous projects of historical proportions. In his time as an engineer and executive, he’s helped to pioneer new systems—cargo management, for example—and founded a publication, SpeedNews, that has shaped the face of industry news since its inception in 1978. Although he’s ofﬁcially retired, he sits on numerous directorial boards and continues to watch the industry to which he’s dedicated his life. Please join ISTAT and Jetrader in congratulating Gil on the receipt of this award and thanking him for the lasting impact that he’s left on our industry. 8 The ofﬁcial publication of the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading

Jetrader - March/April 2010

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