Ivan Flockton
On leaving school in 1961, I
became a "thin sandwich" Student Apprentice with Smiths Industries in Cheltenham. I
studied at the North Gloucs Technical College in Cheltenham and the Rugby College of
Engineering Technology and graduated in June 1966 with a BSc in Electrical Engineering from
London University. In September, 1966 I completed my apprenticeship and became a design and
development engineer with Smiths.
Also, in September, 1966 I married Susan, whom I had met while she studied Hotel & Catering Institutional Management at Gloucester. Sue worked as Assistant School Meals Organizer with the Cheltenham area schools until, in August, 1968 she gave birth to our daughter, Joanne.
I moved to GEC-AEI in Portsmouth to do project planning on underwater weapons programmes in February, 1969. I transferred to the space programmes group in mid-1969 working at various times as project planner, manufacturing coordinator and integration and test engineer. The spacecraft, X3-Prospero, was launched from Woomera, S Australia in October, 1971. I returned shortly before Sue delivered our son, Dean, in December. Sue, besides being housewife and mother of two, found time to teach Cordon Bleu style cooking at evening class.
In May, 1975 I moved to Hawker Siddely Dynamics (HSD) in Stevenage as the project product assurance manager on the ESA orbital test satellite. This started a period of extensive travel to European countries. We lived in Hauxton just 4½ miles south of Cambridge and Sue again taught cookery evening classes.
After less than two years at HSD I saw an advert for a job in Canada, applied and was offered the job. I decided, in 1977, to come for two years, planning to return to Europe to capitalize on my experience. Now, twenty-five years later, I’m still in Canada where Sue also has a career in Health & Safety, our daughter Joanne is a Doctor of Chiropractic with her practice in Kitchener-Waterloo (which is some six to seven hours from Ottawa by car), and our son got his B.Sc. in mechanical engineering and works in Ottawa. He and his wife, Clare, have produced two grandchildren for us, a girl and a boy. Our grandchildren take up a lot of our time at weekends; it’s amazing how much more enjoyable they are than our children were. It must be that we can just hand them back when we’ve become exhausted.
My job here at Telesat Canada is managing a group of seven to eight engineers, specialists in the spacecraft Bus disciplines. We define requirements for our own and consulting customers’ programmes, evaluate bids, monitor spacecraft and launch vehicle procurement, launch the spacecraft and monitor their in-orbit performance. The consulting part of the job has taken me to many parts of the world and provides an ever-changing pallet of interesting projects.
On the personal side, I’ve always had an interest in photography and have taken many snaps which I hope to catalogue more effectively when I retire, than the boxes and drawers they occupy at present. We have designed and built the two houses we’ve owned in Canada so I’ve become quite a proficient do-it-yourselfer for all things in the house and also in landscaping the gardens. I have to admit to not doing much sporting activity from the completion of my college days to about my fortieth birthday when I took up running to avoid having to diet. Since I still am in the habit of eating too much, I also continue to jog to maintain a comfortable weight.