Island Life Magazine Ltd October/November 2007 | Page 30
life
INTERVIEW
A life built on speed
By Roz Whistance
“People think, when you’ve broken the Land Speed
record and raced super-balloons across the
Pacific, that the world’s your oyster,” says design
engineer John Ackroyd. “They are so wrong!”
That the designer of Thrust 2, the car
that won back the land speed record for
Britain in 1983, can be so often jobless and
homeless adds to the tantalising quality
of his book Jet Blast. It is the journal of
a man who followed his boyhood dream,
from plane-spotter to adventurer, and of the
like-minded obsessives he met on the way.
It also chronicles the profound contribution
to adventure made by the Isle of Wight.
We are pouring over John’s photo album
which features the adventurers and
entrepreneurs with whom he has spent
a lifetime. Inevitably there is sadness
30
when we come to pilot and balloonist
Steve Fossett, whose disappearance on
Sept 3 is still a mystery. “I phoned his
engineer to try to get some news but he
couldn’t speak, he burst into tears.”
John himself has flown from the point
Fossett disappeared, hotel magnate Barron
Hilton’s Flying M Ranch, 80 miles from
Reno, Nevada. “You scream up with the
thermals, and you’re thinking ‘slow down!’
But Steve of all people should know what
to do in difficulty,” he says. The fact that
Fossett was scouting for a dry lake bed on
which to attempt a world speed record this
month has chilling parallels to John’s story.
Brushes with those who dance with
death have been bread and butter to
John Ackroyd.The subtitle of the book,
And the Hand of Fate is apt, since for
all his engineering skills and design
brilliance, it is the contribution made by
the onset of bad weather, the break in the
clouds, and the chance meeting of an old
contact, which play as large a part in the
success or otherwise of all the ventures.
John saw his first aircraft as a boy in India,
where his father was serving as a British
Army officer. “The sighting made a big
Island Life - www.isleofwight.net