Dave Calway began his career at Westland as an apprentice and stayed 46 yrs working as an engineer in the blade shop

In those days the apprenticeship was five years and what happened was they moved you into various departments in order to work with a guy in there to learn what he was doing and then you might move to another guy to learn what aspect of the job he was doing. I remember I went into the erecting shop, transmission, where they build the gearboxes. I didn’t go into the fitting shop, which was considered to be a dodgy shop in those days, and I went into the machine shop, which is where I finished my time. When I was twenty-one I came out of my time and I was classed then basically as a skilled machinist.

Back in those days, when I came out of my apprenticeship, we were still involved with doing a little bit of work on the Westland Whirlwind, which was a very old aircraft. We did some work on the Sea King I believe and there was some work being done on the Scout and also on the Dragonfly which was a very, very old aircraft but, you know, we had the odd batches of work to do for those aircraft in order to keep them going.

 

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