Aircraft design Having been dispersed with the Design Office from Brooklands to the nearby Burhill Golf Club in
Hersham, after the Vickers factory was badly bombed in September 1940, Wallis returned to Brooklands in November 1945 as head of the Vickers-Armstrongs Research & Development Department which was based in the former motor circuit's 1907 clubhouse. Here he and his staff worked on many futuristic aerospace projects including supersonic flight and "swing-wing" technology (later used in the
Panavia Tornado and other aircraft types). Following the high death toll of the aircrews involved in the Dambusters raid, he made a conscious effort never again to endanger the lives of his test pilots. His designs were extensively tested in model form, and consequently he became a pioneer in the
remote control of aircraft. A massive Stratosphere Chamber (which was the world's largest facility of its type) was designed and built beside the clubhouse by 1948. It became the focus for much R&D work under Wallis's direction in the 1950s and 1960s, including research into
supersonic aerodynamics that contributed to the design of
Concorde, before finally closing by 1980. This unique structure was restored at
Brooklands Museum thanks to a grant from the AIM-Biffa fund in 2013 and was officially reopened by
Mary Stopes-Roe, Barnes Wallis's daughter, on 13 March 2014. Although he did not invent the concept, Wallis did much pioneering engineering work to make the
swing-wing functional. He developed the wing-controlled
aerodyne, a concept for a tailless aeroplane controlled entirely by wing movement with no separate control surfaces. His
Wild Goose, designed in the late 1940s, was intended to use
laminar flow, and alongside it he also worked on the Green Lizard cruise missile and the Heston JC.9 manned experimental aeroplane. The
Swallow was a supersonic development of Wild Goose, designed in the mid-1950s, which could have been developed for either military or civil applications. Both Wild Goose and Swallow were flight tested as large (30 ft span) flying scale models, based at
Predannack in Cornwall. Despite promising
wind tunnel and model work, his designs were not adopted. Government funding for Swallow was cancelled in the round of cuts following the
Sandys Defence White Paper in 1957 (the Sandystorm), although Vickers continued model trials with some support from the RAE. An attempt to gain American funding led Wallis to initiate a joint
NASA-Vickers study. NASA found aerodynamic problems with the Swallow and, informed also by their work on the
Bell X-5, settled for a conventional tail which would eventually lead in turn to the
TFX programme and the
General Dynamics F-111. In the UK, Vickers submitted a wing-controlled aerodyne for specification OR.346 for a reconnaissance/strike-fighter-bomber, the
TSR-2 specification with added fighter capability. When
Maurice Brennan left Vickers for Folland he worked on the FO.147, a variable-sweep development of the
Gnat lightweight fighter-trainer, offering both tailed and tailless options. Wallis's ideas were ultimately passed over in the UK in favour of the fixed-wing BAC TSR-2 and Concorde. He was critical of both, believing that swing-wing designs would have been more appropriate. In the mid-1960s, TSR-2 was ignominiously scrapped in favour of the American F-111, which had swing-wings influenced by Wallis's work at NASA, although this order was also subsequently cancelled.
Other work In the 1950s, Wallis developed an experimental rocket-propelled
torpedo codenamed HEYDAY. It was powered by compressed air and
hydrogen peroxide, and had an unusual streamlined shape designed to maintain
laminar flow over much of its length. Tests were conducted from
Portland Breakwater in Dorset. The only surviving example is on display in the
Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower at
Gosport. In 1955, Wallis agreed to act as a consultant to the project to build the
Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia. Some of the ideas he suggested are the same as or closely related to the final design, including the idea of supporting the dish at its centre, the geodetic structure of the dish and the master equatorial control system. Unhappy with the direction it had taken, Wallis left the project halfway into the design study and refused to accept his £1,000 consultant's fee. In the 1960s, Wallis also proposed using large cargo
submarines to transport oil and other goods, thus avoiding surface weather conditions. Wallis's calculations indicated that the power requirements for an underwater vessel were lower than for a comparable conventional ship and they could be made to travel at a much higher speed. In the end, nothing came of Wallis's submarine ideas. During the 1960s and into his retirement, he developed ideas for an "all-speed" aircraft, capable of efficient flight at all speed ranges from subsonic to
hypersonic. In the late 1950s, Wallis gave a lecture titled "The strength of England" at
Eton College, and continued to deliver versions of the talk into the early 1970s, presenting technology and automation as a way to restore Britain's dominance. He advocated nuclear-powered cargo submarines as a means of making Britain immune to future embargoes, and to make it a global trading power. He complained of the loss of aircraft design to the United States, and suggested that Britain could dominate air travel by developing a small supersonic airliner capable of
short take-off and landing. == Honours and awards ==