Engineer Dr John Roberts talks to Helen Pilcher about rollercoasters, Top Gear stunts and his latest design project, the British Airways i360.
I’m perhaps best known for my work on theme park rides and attractions.
I’ve been a design engineer for most of my working life. The projects that I work on are challenging because each one is unique. There are no prototypes. You only get one chance to build them correctly and that’s what keeps me interested.
I became interested in engineering while I was still at school.
I spent a summer holiday working on a construction site, digging holes in the ground and measuring the density of the soil. I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week and made enough money to buy myself a Mini Cooper S. I was pretty pleased with that. But then I looked at the engineer driving around the site in his big, white Land Rover and wondered how much he was earning… and decided to study civil engineering at university.
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