Geoffrey T. R. Hill

Who was Geoffrey T. R. Hill?

Professor Geoffrey Terence Roland Hill MC, M.Sc, M.I.Mech.E., FRAeS, was a British aeronautical engineer.

He was a pilot with No. 29 Squadron RFC and later a test pilot during the First World War as was his brother Roderic. Both working with Handley Page. He made several designs of tailess aircraft which were built by Westland Aircraft: the Westland-Hill Pterodactyls from the 1920s onwards.

In 1939 he headed a project in Pawlett, near Bridgwater, Somerset, investigating methods for cutting the cables on enemy barrage balloons; recovery from stalling after contact with such cables was an important part of his work there.

He was British Scientific Liaison Officer at the National Research Council in Canada in the mid-1940s. There, he made the proposal for a glider for the study of the control and stability of tailless aircraft. The glider design was built and flew from 1946 until the project was ended around 1950.

Hill worked with David Keith-Lucas of Short Brothers on the design of the experimental Short SB.4 Sherpa, a research aircraft aimed primarily at assisting in the development of wings for faster, very high-altitude aircraft. It was the first aircraft to employ the "aero-isoclinic" wing first proposed by Hill in 1951.