Airborne Computing System Developments at Elliott-Automation, 1958–1988

Peter Hearne, F R Eng., was born in 1927. His posts have included that of Director and General Manager of Elliott Flight Automation (subsequently GEC Avionics) from 1965 to 1986, Assistant Managing Director of the GEC Marconi Group 1986/90, and Chairman of GEC Marconi Avionics from 1992 to 1993. His personal account of the application of digital computers to aircraft was written in 2007. Whilst Peter Hearne drew largely from his own considerable experience, he also had available certain background material from ex-colleagues, as given in [1, 2]. Peter’s draft text was shown to three other former Elliott colleagues, R W (Ron) Howard, Paul Rayner and Terry Froggatt, who provided some additional information as detailed respectively in [3–5].