Interview with Professor Sir Iain Gray

Professor Sir Iain Gray was born in Manchester and grew up in Aberdeen.  Iain has two younger sisters, he says:  “My dad’s ambition was that I be an engineer, my younger sister be a lawyer and my third sister would be in the medical profession. It turned out I am an engineer, my younger sister is a lawyer, and my third sister went into IT and technology specialisms.”

Iain’s maternal grandfather was a civil engineer and his father was an engineer, he adds: “There’s definitely a bit of engineering in the family heritage line.  My father was an aerospace engineer and like a lot of fathers he wanted his son to become an aerospace engineer.  As a young person I was always very keen on aerospace, although I wasn’t always convinced about aerospace engineering, but in the end he got his way and I very much followed in his footsteps.”

Iain’s parents provided “subliminal encouragement” to the education of their children, he says: “They were very supportive parents and very keen that we’d find our own way in the world, but giving us the opportunities to develop ourselves. They weren’t pushy parents, they were great. They had a huge influence on my career and my life and gave me an awful lot to be grateful for.”

Iain attended his local primary and grammar schools in Aberdeen, one of which was a brand new school. He says: “I have very fond memories, particularly of my, primary schooldays.  I was very fortunate, I went to a newly built school. I was in the most senior year at that school for three years running and it gave you an early sense of responsibility and leadership that quite often in a primary school you don’t get until you’re at that very final year, and some great opportunities came along.  I was the last of the eleven-plus generation in Scotland, and went to Aberdeen Grammar School where I spent six very happy years and made lots of friends.  Coming out of that developed all the basic science and mathematical skills that have been invaluable for me throughout my career.”

Having completed his school education, Iain went to Aberdeen University to study engineering. He says of his choice: “Aberdeen was where my friends went, it did the course I wanted to go and do, so it seemed very natural just to carry on my schooling and go to Aberdeen University.”

He says of his course: “I did what was called an engineering science degree.  At the time I think there were only two or three other universities in the UK offering an engineering science degree, and effectively that allowed you to choose which of the engineering sectors you went into and you could specialise in certain areas. My specialisms tended to be more on the structures, the aeroelastic structural dynamic side, and I can remember at one of the lectures, a picture one of our structural dynamics lecturers put up of an aircraft wing and all the wiring and strain gauging and everything that was on it, and thinking, wow, that looks pretty impressive, that looks really good.”

It was at Aberdeen University that Iain first encountered computers, he explains: “Aberdeen was quite progressive on the computer side.  There were huge new computer buildings that were being established on campus.  We got involved in control theories, and in Fortran programming.  One of my thesis projects was writing computer programs related to the other disciplines I was involved in.  So there was quite an early introduction into computing and the computer science department because it was an engineering science degree, we very much got into some of theories and the basics of computer technologies and computer programming. It influenced, from an application point of view, how I saw computer technology applying into the aerospace sector, and computers have been one of the big enablers of the aerospace sector for four or five decades now.  I always saw myself more in the application side of things than on the computer science side of things per se.”

In 1979, after completing his degree, Iain joined British Aerospace through the company’s graduate recruitment programme. He remained with the company until 2007.

Iain says: “British Aerospace was the foremost aerospace company in the UK, so if you had determined that you were going to go into a career in aerospace, there were one of only two or three real options you pursued at the time and the bigger question was which part of the company did you want to be involved in, which part of the country did you want to move to. I joined and I quite explicitly selected Bristol as the site that I wanted to go and do my graduate training at. … The thing that convinced me to move to Bristol was the involvement it had had in the Concorde project; it was Concorde in the end that kind of really drew me into the aerospace industry.”

Iain quickly settled in Bristol and loved the cosmopolitan nature of the city as well as the industry he had joined, adding : “Concorde was one of the things that attracted me into the business and here we were at Filton, we still had the final Concordes in manufacture, we’d some huge test facilities related to Concorde, it was like a dream come true for me.”

Asked if it was a blow when Concorde was decommissioned, he says: “I could see it coming.  Technically, I have been a lifelong enthusiast on that particular aircraft. I had the very good fortune of leading a team which was in charge of product support for Concorde, I had a period in my career where I was responsible for the development of a potential successor to the Concorde.  But all of that was against a backdrop of knowing the downsides, how does it make sense in a commercial sense, what’s the business case, how do we comply with the ever more stringent and evolving environmental conditions etc.  So yes, it was a disappointment, but it was one you could foresee coming. I was just ever so grateful to have had the opportunity at that time in my career to be part of.”

While working at British Aerospace, Iain completed a Masters at Southampton University.  He says of the experience: “One of the things I learned during the time was the educational aspect and what I learnt and what I did there, but the other was that behavioural aspect of the constant need to try and find the right moments in time to incentivise people, what does incentivise people. It isn’t always money, it is about development and lifelong learning and meeting new people and doing things.  So Southampton was very good for me in that regard.  It introduced me to people who I still connect with today: Professor Sir Peter Gregson was a key influencer in my career and I met him while I was doing my Masters at Southampton. I learnt and met new people, loved it.”

In 2007, Iain became managing director and general manager of Airbus UK.

 Iain reflects on his time working with British Aerospace where he feels he was witness to the evolution of the aerospace industry, including the UK’s involvement in the Airbus programmes, and the increasing complexity in the design of projects.  He says: “Concorde was incredibly complex, but in many respects it was designed at a time of much more simplistic tools.  In the context of computing and computer technology, you can look at computing technology both on the product itself, that evolved enormously over those 30-year period, but also the use of computers in the design, the support, the manufacturing process. I very well remember my first jobs preparing a stack of cards which you’d leave outside your office to be collected by a bureau overnight.  You’d go in first thing in the morning to see what you had back from the computer and five times out of ten you had a job fail because you’d typed a card wrong or something like that. That was all part of that evolution of computers used within the business itself.”

Reflecting on the highlight of his career at Aerospace and Airbus, Iain adds: “It was probably my period working on the A380 project, the double-decker project.  I was head of engineering at the time in Airbus in the UK when Airbus made its maiden flight (27^th April 2005) that was the culmination of ten years’ engineering effort. To be part of the team and to see that aircraft successfully take off and fly is probably is the highlight of my engineering career to date, it was just a magnificent moment, that culmination of all of those years’ engineering efforts.”

Asked if he was a natural leader, he says: “I wouldn’t say I was always like that, there’s always been an element of wanting to be in control of your own destiny and what you do. I learnt a lot from people.  I was very lucky to have some excellent mentors, they were some of the more senior engineers that I’d learned to respect who would sit down with you and provide career advice. Technically and managerially I would say one of my strengths has always been the ability to get on with people, to try and find a common position between sometimes differing views, differing positions, and that’s something I think I’ve always had naturally. But from a management and leadership point of view, I’ve received lots of good advice and tips.  The best advice I ever got was don’t change yourself, just be who you are and recognise your strengths, your weaknesses, work to your strengths, get others to help you overcome some of the areas where perhaps you have development needs. That ethos has worked very well for me.

“One of the other tips I picked up on really quite early on in my career was to look for the positives in everything that you do, because let’s face it, in your career there are things that are really enjoyable and a real high point, there are things which actually are the drudgery, and you need to look for the positives, even in those much more mundane tasks.

“This was a tip somebody gave me early on, somebody told to me that when somebody asks you to go and photocopy something for them at the machine, have a wee read of it as you’re going to the machine and understand it, and when you get back, ask a question about what you’re just read, and learn that way. Always look for the positive and what can I learn from this, no matter how small, mundane, whatever task you have and then when it comes to the big stuff you’re much more willing to ask some of the naïve or the difficult questions that sometimes people aren’t quite so willing to ask because they’re scared it exposes their own weaknesses.”

Asked how his life changed when he became Managing Director of Airbus UK, Iain says: “You have a responsibility at all levels, but you suddenly have a responsibility for many thousands of people, there’s a social responsibility angle which was different.  There was much more of a corporate strategic angle to the job, so you’re not just thinking about the next six months, the next twelve months, you’re trying to position the business on behalf of all your employees to protect them for the longer future.

“The other thing, which doesn’t necessarily come naturally to me but is an absolutely integral part of the job, is putting yourself outside your comfort zone in terms of communicating to the outside world, being the person that is the face of the organisation, for good or for bad.”

Iain was Managing Director of Airbus UK at the time the UK aerospace industry was experiencing a significant rationalisation and reorganisation. He says: “I think the UK lost its way a little bit. Not necessarily the number of companies involved or the number of jobs involved, but we no longer made overall aeroplanes, we no longer did things, so the control started to slip out of the UK a little bit more. That was tough, because suddenly in a multi-national company, you’re trying to represent the voice of your employees in the UK, in an organisation that’s much more of a global organisation and the UK’s only part of it.  I found that really quite tough.  I always wanted to wear my Union Jack on my sleeve and promote the UK interest and sometimes that wasn’t always the direction that the business was going in.”

He adds: “I’m not the first and I won’t be the last person that feels that conflict. It is a question of finding a way of managing those conflicts, because there’s a part of you that forever wants to support the softer parts of the business agenda and there’s other parts of you absolutely recognise the business imperatives of being a global leading business.  So that’s a tension.”

Asked if there were things that the UK could have done differently at that time, Iain says: “I think the UK gave away what was a potential very strong leadership position by a lack of joined up government thinking at the time, potentially a conflict between the direction that the country wanted to go in terms of its respective relationships with the US and its respective relationships with Europe.  At the commercial aviation level, there was a period where we backed the wrong horse and a lot of decisions went the wrong way for us in the UK.  The UK still has a very, very strong role to play, but the bit that I feel we lost was that overall aircraft leadership and integration level, and at a commercial level I think we have always, as a country, under-estimated the influence of the geographic location of where a board is located, and we allowed boardroom decisions effectively to take place outside of the UK.  That would never have happened in France.”

In 2007, Iain joined the Technology Strategy Board as Chief Executive.

 Iain says that having achieved a high-point of his career with the launch of the Airbus A380, and with the next big project being a ten year one, he felt it was the right time to leave, he explains: “If you’re going to move in your career, you need to move at a point when you can make a difference and do something different. So for me, there was a very logical decision point in my career that I did want to try and do something else.  There was a potential to take a senior position in Toulouse, and my wife didn’t particularly want to move there. So my decision was a combination of wanting to try and do something a little bit different, to try and demonstrate to myself I could do something different combined with those kind of pressures, it was the right time to move.

“In 2007, an opportunity came to be the first Chief Executive of a new government funded organisation called the Technology Strategy Board at the time (now Innovate UK), which I found very appealing. I had a terrific seven, eight years at the Technology Strategy Board, and have no regrets whatsoever for moving.”

Reflecting on the highlights of his time with TSB, Iain says: “One was getting involved in other sectors and realising the transferrable skills that went from aerospace into healthcare, into energy and into automotive.  My first four weeks at the Technology Strategy Board, I had two meetings, one was in Glasgow on some work related to the prediction of blood flows through prevention of blood clots in the brain and they were using Airbus A380 software to predict the flow of blood.  I then had a conversation with Lloyds Register and they were very much looking at their predictive techniques for storms and again, they were using aviation software to do that. It was great getting to know and to understand the different sectors and from a tech point of view, understanding where you could learn from one sector and apply transferable skills into another.

“The other highlight was a slightly different look at things. Aerospace tends to be driven by the large companies, and TSB gave me exposure to the innovation, the entrepreneurial, the small business sector. … To spend seven or eight years immersed in that kind of innovation, entrepreneurial community was amazing.”

Iain has carried this experience and exposure back into his various non-executive roles. He says: “It exposed me to a different community and it made me (a) realise that I had something that I could offer back into that community, but (b) that I could live and breathe on the excitement and the enthusiasm and the dynamism of small start-ups that many big companies constantly try to emulate and find ways of emulating.”

The Technology Strategy Board changed its name to Innovate UK, Iain explains: “It didn’t really say what it was doing on the tin so it was rebranded as Innovate UK and that stood the test of time.  With Innovate UK we came up with the notion of the Catapults and the Catapult Centres are still growing, they’re all £100 million businesses in their own right. I think Innovate UK gave it a broader umbrella than the title Technology Strategy Board.”

Asked about how difficult it is to identify a potential winning innovative start-up, Iain says: “There was an adage we used which was it wasn’t about picking winners, it was about picking races and which races the UK should be in. We then structured facilitated conversations or network grants or things to help companies within those chosen races to compete. I think it has been successful.  It’s a long term game and of course inevitably there will be failures along the way as well, and we had that whole ethos of failure being a positive metric.  In California, there is a culture where failure is a positive metric, and in the UK failure’s not an option, but there’s so much you can learn from an innovation enterprise sense, people fail, start up again, keep going.  I think there’s some really, really good big success stories that have come out of Innovate UK.  I loved my time with it and some of the business connections I made then are still very, very close business connections.”

After his tenure at Innovate UK, Iain moved to Cranfield University. He says: “I’m not a lifelong academic and probably not your archetypal academic either, so Cranfield, is probably the right kind of university for me.  It’s a very industry-led, industry-focussed university, a postgraduate only university.

“When I was at Airbus we were forever trying to develop strong partnering relationships with universities and we always treated them as another part of our supply chain and didn’t fully understand what a university was all about.  Innovate UK was a business-led, university-engaged initiative, but I learnt a lot about that triangle – universities, government, business – all working together. It just seemed to me quite natural, having spent my time in industry, having learnt all that through Innovate UK, to throw my hat in the ring and try and join up the industry, academic, government network.

“I was given the opportunity to join Cranfield as Director of Aerospace to shape the strategy of the university around the aviation aerospace agenda, and also with a significant budget, profit and loss accountability for one of the biggest centres in the university itself, and I’ve been there eight years.”

He says of the experience: “I love the positive engagement with young people with ideas, with aspiring professionals, people that are going to go on and become the leaders of the business.  I’ve loved the opportunity to be at the sharp end of a sector which is changing quite dramatically through both technology opportunities and things like environmental challenges. To be at the forefront of some of the autonomous technology work, the work about drones, about eVTOL – Vertical Take-Off and Lift vehicles, very early thinking around battery electric aircraft, about liquid hydrogen aircraft.  It’s a sector that has started, through those technologies, to embrace the role of start-up companies and graduates, young business people can set up businesses in those sectors in a way that perhaps they never could in the seventies, eighties, nineties.  The university’s been at the forefront of both a cultural change, a technology change and the environmental challenges the sector is facing up to, it’s a very responsible sector to those challenges and right through my career environment’s been pretty close to top of the agenda.  It is now absolutely top of the agenda and universities have a huge role to play in ensuring both the social and technological changes necessary to meet the 2050 goals. It’s been incredibly exciting for me.”

Iain is the Chair of the Aerospace Bristol Museum which has been open for five years.  He says: “We’re telling the story of Bristol aerospace from a tech a tech point of view. Bristol was at the forefront of a lot of the early space work we did in the UK, it was at the forefront of a lot of the very early computer development activities.  Concorde itself was one of the very first products to have computer technology applied on the platform itself.”

Iain is also involved with Versarien, which is developing graphene. He explains: “Versarien was one of the companies I came across when I was working at Innovate UK.  Graphene is a very interesting product, it’s the world’s strongest material, and celebrates its ten-year anniversary this year (2024). It is one of those materials that has both electrical conductivity properties, strength properties that present great opportunities.  But like a lot of materials there are qualification aspects, there are market aspects, it takes a long time for a new material, a new idea to become successful in the marketplace.  Versarien is inching its way in terms of product development, focussing around things like textiles and graphene in concrete, giving it additional strength properties, but ultimately will end up in very hi-tech products in aerospace, in communications, electrical devices, LCD kind of displays.  Versarien’s got endless possibilities and is one of those companies pushing the boundaries of where those applications should be.  It’s a company that’s had a clear vision of it needs to address short-term markets as well as positioning itself for those long term.  It’s not a university, it’s a business and needs to find where its markets are now and that is where my Innovate experience comes to bear.”

Iain is also involved in a non-executive role with CFMS, a digital engineering company based on the Bristol and Bath Science Park. Iain says: “It’s been a custodian of its own high-performance computer, a Cray, for some five to ten years, and provides a computing service to many of the companies in the aerospace, energy sectors.  Increasingly, it’s a company that’s providing digital capability around the application of artificial intelligence into all kinds of applications from city planning,  space, aerospace, automotive factory design concepts.  So it’s a business that’s slightly repositioning itself from just providing computing capacity and computing support into a digital engineering company in its own right.”

Having been UK based for his career, with visits to Europe and the US, Iain comments on whether he ever felt a need to relocate to work abroad and says: “The UK’s part of a global village, and I think there are big opportunities within the UK itself. It depends what opportunities come your way and what opportunities fit with your own desires and objectives in life. I would counsel people if they came to me for advice to really consider very carefully if they got the opportunity for an overseas placement or an overseas assignment to take it, to consider it very seriously.  I think it for me is one of the shortcomings of my own background.  But I’ve been in the fortunate situation that I’ve compensated for that in other ways.”

Reflecting on his career, Iain says that there are many proudest achievements at many different phases over his life. He says: “Last year I was in the very, very privileged position of receiving a knighthood from Prince William at Windsor Castle, and it’s got to be one of the proudest moments of your life when you receive an award like that.

“At the other end of the spectrum I’m very proud of being presented the Baird of Bute Society Award. It is an award named after Andrew Baird who was a blacksmith that lived on the Isle of Bute, accredited potentially with the first heavier than air flight in Scotland. The award aims to raise the awareness of engineering and STEM or STEAM-related career paths to young children on the west coast of Scotland. I received it in recognition of my contribution to the aerospace sector from a Scotland perspective. I was enormously proud to receive that, and I’m enormously proud to be associated with it, it is something that is promoting engineering, technology to young people in a part of the UK that perhaps is less exposed to those opportunities.  I’ve been very privileged, all the honorary degrees I’ve had at universities.  What’s been nice has been those universities that have particularly followed up on an honorary degree and engaged you in their alumni events, engaged you in the communication and what’s going on, and made you feel part of that community moving forward.  Those have been incredible experiences as well.”

Asked about how the world may change over the next ten years, Iain says: “It is a changing world and there are things I worry about and the things I’m really excited and positive about.

“The things I worry about tend to be a bit more on the social and ethics side of things.  There’s got to be concerns and issues around how AI is part of our community going forward, with questions such as where does autonomy stop and start in terms of what we want in terms of driverless cars and pilotless aircraft.  There’s that kind of social and ethical side.

“I do worry that post-Covid, through all the technology enablers that have developed through Covid and subsequently since Covid, how many young people seem to have lost the art of communication and I think the unintended consequences of that are something we should worry about. That’s why it’s so important that we continue with encouraging young people to go to events, conferences, to physically network, to just appreciate the importance of listening to what other people say.

“One of the phrases that I particularly like is what’s called the magic of unlikely alliances.  How things from left field, completely different sectors, completely different ways of thinking can be incredibly helpful. I worry the way we work now diminishes some of the possibilities of the magic of unlikely alliances.

“To flip it round, there are some fantastic technology opportunities. Young people are starting businesses up effectively from their bedroom and things you could never have done before.

“In the world of aerospace the integration of drones into our airspace. I think will become part and parcel of our everyday life, delivery drones, last mile drones, drones for healthcare delivery, drones for surveillance.  But all of that requires the integration of drones into our current airspace and that isn’t going to happen without significant evolution of using applied artificial intelligence for airspace management, for example.

“To meet the environmental challenges and goals we need the continued development of batteries, alternate fuels, hydrogen, I think there’ll be a huge agenda for hydrogen over the next twenty, thirty years.  But where are we going to get all the electricity to electrolyze to produce the hydrogen.  So the challenge of looking at things from a total system perspective is great.

“Part of my responsibility at Cranfield extends to the space and astronautics agenda.  When I see the opportunities that are emerging for young people in respect of Small CubeSats, small satellites putting things into space, affordable space launch just opens up a whole load of new opportunities as well.  So I think there’s some very big opportunities around the space agenda.”

Asked what advice he would give to young people considering their careers today, Iain says: “Do it.  Have confidence in your ideas, have confidence, be prepared to listen and learn from some of those that have scars on their back and been there before, but don’t be intimidated by what people describe as the challenges. It’s a brave new world, so my advice would be, find a way of realising your dreams, do it by doing.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley