Alfred Pippard

Who was Alfred Pippard?

Alfred John Sutton Pippard MBE FRS was a British civil engineer and academic. Pippard was the son of a carpenter and joiner and spent much of his early life helping his father on construction sites. Initially supposed to follow his father into the family business, Pippard instead decided to study for a bachelors degree in civil engineering at the University of Bristol, supporting himself with an Exhibition award. Pippard worked for a Bristol based consulting engineer and for the Pontypridd and Rhondda Valley Joint Water Board in his early career. He also completed his masters degree during this period.

At the start of the First World War Pippard joined the Admiralty Air Department where he studied aircraft stresses. After the war he joined an aeronautical engineering consultancy with many of his colleagues and was involved in accident investigation cases. He gained his Doctorate of Science from Bristol in 1920 and took up the chair in Civil Engineering at University College, Cardiff in 1922. This began a long career in academia at Cardiff, Bristol and Imperial College during which he was responsible for the analysis of the methods used in the design of the R100 and R101 airships. The public enquiry into the latter's crash, which ended British participation in airship development, found no faults with Pippard's work but he withdrew from the field of aeronautical engineering - feeling keenly the loss of several of his friends amongst the 48 dead.