Archibald Russell

Sir Archibald Russell, CBE, FRS (30 May 1904 – 29 May 1995) was a British aerospace engineer who worked most of his career at the Bristol Aeroplane Company, before becoming managing director of the Filton Division when Bristol merged into British Aircraft Corporation in 1960. He also served as the vice-chairman of the BAC-Sud Aviation Concorde Committee that produced the Concorde, working alongside Morien Morgan. His designs include the Blenheim, Britannia, Type 188 and many others. He was known throughout his career as a perfectionist, as well as his criticism for those who did not measure up – criticisms that included ministers, civil servants, the Brabazon Committee and BOAC.

Archibald Russell was born in Cinderford, Gloucestershire. He was raised in the Forest of Dean and attended East Dean Grammar School where his father (known as "the mathemagician" owing to his facility in complex mental calculation) was headmaster. When he was fifteen the family moved to Bristol and his education continued at Fairfield Grammar School, and then the Engineering faculty of Bristol University where he gained a BSc in automotive engineering. His first job was maintaining buses for the Bristol Tramways & Carriage Company, one of Sir George White's companies.

Another of George White's companies was the Bristol Aeroplane Company. Russell joined the company in May 1925, at age 21, as an assistant in the stress office. He met Miss Lorna Mansfield, a secretary at the company, and they were married for over 50 years. One of his first efforts at the company were stress calculations for the Type 99 Badminton, a biplane racer being built for the 1926 King's Cup. The Badminton crashed a month before the race, which gravely concerned Russell until the reason was revealed to be a seized engine. Another early design was the Type 95 Bagshot, a twin-engine monoplane fighter. Russell was invited to take a flight in the Bagshot, and was alarmed to see the wings twisting during control use, a problem that led to the abandoning of the design. He developed a new method of separately calculating bending and torsional stresses, which later led to a new single-spar monoplane wing design that was granted a patent.

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