Geoffrey T. R. Hill

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Professor Geoffrey T.R. Hill was a British aeronautical engineer.

He was a test pilot during the First World War. He made several designs of tailess aircraft which were built by Westland Aircraft: the Westland-Hill Pterodactyls from the 1920s onwards.

In 1939 he headed a project in Pawlett, near Exeter, Devon, investigating methods for cutting the cables on enemy barrage balloons^[1]; recovery from stalling^[2] after contact with such cables was an important part of his work there.

He was British Scientific Liaison Officer at the National Research Council (NRC) in Canada in the mid-1940s. There he made the proposal for a glider for the study of the control and stability of tailless aircraft. The glider design was built and flew from 1946 until the project was ended around 1950.

Hill worked with David Keith-Lucas of Short Brothers on the design of the experimental Short Sherpa (not to be confused with the transport aircraft, developed from the Short Skyvan, which was given the same name in the United States), a research aircraft aimed primarily at assisting in the development of wings for faster, very high-altitude aircraft. It was the first aircraft to employ the "aero-isoclinic" wing first proposed by Hill in 1951.