George Edwards was one of British aviation’s most accomplished and respected practitioners and one of its most stalwart and articulate advocates. Perhaps supreme among his achievements was the bringing to fruition and successive development of the world’s first turbo.prop airliner, the Vickers Viscount after 1948. But his career was studded with the names of famous aircraft, both civil and military - first at Vickers and then at the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC) - in whose design he had a hand, or whose development he oversaw. Among these were the Valiant jet bomber of the early 1950s; the elegant VC10 military and civil jet transport of the 1960s; the revolutionary TSR2 strike aircraft which fell victim to politics in 1965; the Anglo-French Jaguar strike fighter of 1972, which is still in service; and the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic airliner project, whose success owed so much to his tact and diplomacy.

Nor were his attainments confined to the aeronautical field. His interests and skills embraced a wide spectrum - from painting and cricket to small boat sailing, golf and Surrey University. Most of all, his successful line of a dozen different types of British civil and military aircraft - almost 1,500 of them built and sold in the home and export markets - made a major contribution to the United Kingdom’s coffers and prestige in aviation over more than 40 years.

George Edwards’s aircraft may not have had quite the elegance of line seen in the products of Sydney Camm, nor perhaps the wider variety of those built by Geoffrey de Havilland. But they had four supreme qualities. They were immensely robust; they were a delight to fly in both civil and military forms; they met well their customers’ requirements; and - most important of all - their performance was in the vanguard of technical progress.

All this was achieved consistently through the years by design, construction, flight test and sales teams led from the front by GRE, as he was universally known at Vickers and BAC, in a direct and uncomplicated manner, always with skill and good humour and without a shade of pomposity.

In his 40 years in aeronautics - from 1935 to 1975 - he had to endure many frustrations, most of which arose from the political timidity or misconceptions of others. Besides the TSR2 there was the V1000 project, cancelled in 1955 just when it promised to achieve for Britain a lead into profitable trans.atlantic jet services. There was the “Three-Eleven” wide-body, 250 passenger “airbus” - ahead of its competitors but denied support in 1975. And but for General de Gaulle and the British Minister of Aviation, Julian Amery, Concorde might well have been killed off in 1964.

Edwards not only designed his series of remarkable aircraft but forged a new concept of “high-tech” international collaboration. As he remarked, with his dry and penetrating wit: “If you could colla.borate successfully on an advanced design such as Concorde with the French, then you could do it with anything and anybody.” Thereafter, the military collaborative programmes came along relatively painlessly.

George Robert Edwards was born at Highams Park, Essex, in 1908. He came into a family with its roots in the tech.nology and transport of the time. His father, Edwin George Edwards, was station master at Walthamstow on the Great Eastern Railway. Edwards’s mother, Mary Elizabeth (née Freeman), died when he was born.

Edwards first went to school at Woodford Green, then to the South West Essex Technical College and from there to acquire a degree in engineering at London University. For seven years from 1928 he was engaged as a budding structural engineer in such diverse projects as hydraulic machinery and steam tugs - the latter at Hay’s Wharf, near London Bridge.

In 1935 he joined the design office of Vickers (Aviation) at Brooklands, Surrey. Under the benevolent eyes of the pioneer aircraft designer Rex Pierson, he quickly mastered the peculiarities of aeronautical work, first on the Vickers G4/31 biplane, then on the Wellesley and Wellington bombers of Barnes Wallis’s geodetic “basketwork” construction.

In 1938 he was engaged on the preparation of four special long-range Wellesleys which, in November that year, won for Britain the world distance record of 7,158 nautical miles, flown non-stop by RAF crews from Ismailia, Egypt, to Port Darwin, Australia, in 48 hours.

For his part in that success Edwards was selected by Rex Pierson, early in the Second World War, to take charge of top-priority work to convert four Wellington MkI bombers as magnetic mine-sweepers against the menace to Allied shipping, laid by the Luftwaffe in coastal waters. The “degaussing” Wellingtons - with large electrically charged coils in hemispherical casings underneath - put an end to the magnetic mine problem, and earned for George Edwards the responsible job of experimental manager at the Vickers works in 1940.

His wartime tasks at Weybridge included the pressurised “crew capsules” for special high-flying Wellington MkVs - the first in British aircraft - and the prototype construction of the Warwick and Windsor bombers, and of Vickers’s last fighter, the prototype, twin-Merlin F7/41, high-altitude Type 432.