John Findlater

Background

Findlater was born in Motherwell, Scotland, in May 1926, the son of a railway superintendent.

Education

He moved to Inverness at a young age, and was educated at Inverness Royal Academy, where he developed a fascination with aircraft.

Career

During the, Findlater served in the Royal Air Force, working aboard weather-monitoring ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Later in the war, he survived a violent plane crash in a Bristol Blenheim light bomber at an Inverness airfield, being the only crewperson to escape without serious injury. While in the Royal Air Force, Findlater became highly knowledgeable about aircraft and aeronautical engineering, and worked as a consultant and researcher with the Royal Air Force numerous times in his later career.

After the war, Findlater joined the Met Office, beginning his career as a teacher of meteorology in Nairobi, Kenya.

While in Kenya, he began studying the monsoon winds that develop around the Horn of Africa, conducting hundreds of research flights over the Indian Ocean to gather data. During this period, he discovered a previously unknown wind system that blows diagonally across the Indian Ocean parallel to the Somalian coast.

The phenomenon was named the Findlater jet in his honour. He then returned to the United Kingdom, where he served as a Principal Scientific Officer and air crash investigator for the Met Office.

In 1987, two years before his retirement from the Met Office, Findlater investigated the haar, or coastal fog, that affected operations at Royal Air Force bases in Scotland.

He continued to offer expert advice on aviation policy in his later years, advocating for the conservation of aircraft such as the Hawker Siddeley Nimrod maritime patrol jet. He died in March 2013 at the age of 86.

Achievements

• He received numerous awards for his scientific research and public service, including the LG Groves Memorial Prize (which he won twice) and the Imperial Service Meda Findlater furthermore received the LG Groves Memorial Prize for his research. He received a second LG Groves Memorial Prize for this work. Findlater retired from the Met Office in 1989, receiving the Imperial Service Medal for his distinguished service.