John Harlow in his own words – In Memoriam
In 1973, whilst working at Hunting Engineering (Ampthill) John was posted for a 6- month stint at the Rocket Propulsion Establishment (RPE) Westcott. Initially reporting to Stan Green, (Chevaline Motor Project Manager) on the latest Polaris DASO shots John continued supporting Westcott not only on Chevaline but also in their work for Roy Dommett at SW4, RAE Farnborough. Thirteen years later (!) John jumped ship and joined the MoD, still working at and out of Westcott. As Chevaline work drew down, John continued working as the Manager of the Systems Support Group at Westcott. This duty involved servicing contracts for the MoD and other UK defence companies such as Shorts. Having had a baptism of fire (Saddam’s Scud-based missiles) whilst in Tel Aviv in January 1991, John was sought out to assist the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in New York in their quest to seek out and eliminate Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. For this John was awarded an MBE for services to the defence Industry. Despite this work taking most of his time during the 1990’s, other contracts also needed servicing including much more work for MoD and QinetiQ.
After Privatisation it took 6 months for John to negotiate his release from Westcott’s new owners – British Aerospace. After lots more work for UNSCOM, it’s successor UNMOVIC and IAEA (Vienna) as a Consultant, Atlantic Research Corporation (ARC) had bought Westcott and John joined the group there. Eventually, after many changes in ownership the Westcott group came under the wing of Aerojet (now Aerojet Rocketdyne -AR) and John transferred now working mainly for the in-space propulsion group (Redmond) but also other parts of AR. Meanwhile, in 2003/2004 John was called back to Iraq in support of the Iraq Survey Group (IAG) as the leader of the Delivery Systems Team (mainly on ballistic missiles but UAV and other smaller missiles also figured) John finally retired from consulting in 2017 whilst still supporting AR.
