Meet the Members
A fourth to reckon with…
This month we chat to Andy Phillips, an enthusiastic RV builder and flyer, who is on his fourth build. He is also the man behind fuel system component company, Andair Limited…
W
elcome Andy, can you tell us something about your career?
My current day job is that I’m building another RV, my fourth, an RV-7, but I still go into work at Andair on a sort of part-time basis. I help with inspecting finished parts ready to go to the customer, but more on that later. As for schooling I went to Courtmoor Secondary school at Fleet in Hampshire. All I really wanted to do was to play cricket, plus build and fly model aeroplanes, but I was also active in our school youth club where we took over the woodworking shop in the evenings to make a PBK canoe – a plywood frame and spruce stringers with canvas stretched over it. I left school at 15 and applied to The Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to become a toolmaker.
54 | LIGHT AVIATION | September 2021
Above Andy Phillips in his Van’s RV-7, his third RV build, at the LAA Rally in 2015
They offered me a craft apprenticeship and I became one of the 1962 intake, which was the start of six years of a fantastic education. I was very interested in instrument making and had been making parts for radar etc. when my apprentice supervisor entered me in the Establishment competition to make a test piece to a drawing, and much to my surprise I won. They then sent me to the British Apprentice competition, which I managed to win as well, so they decided I should go to Utrecht in Holland to compete in the International Apprentice Competition, where I came third. When I returned home, I was presented with a gold watch and interviewed on the radio. And to round things off, when the Queen and Prince Philip came to Farnborough to open part of what was then the new Concorde building, I was presented to them. It was a real honour!
