Ian McCallum 1940-2023

Ian went up to Fitzwilliam College in 1959 to read Electrical Engineering, having already joined the Royal Navy. He was thus able to spend three blissful years in the Engineering department, supported on a subaltern’s pay. After graduation, and several sea going appointments, he was delighted to be sent back to Cambridge to do an advanced course in control engineering, which set him up for his later career moves. Ian then spent six wonderful years at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich teaching in the nuclear department, in what was an ideal posting, where he won a naval award for innovation. It was while at Greenwich that he found time to do a PhD in ship control, with City University, determining a new method for the mathematical modelling of maritime dynamics. (He also by now had three children, for whom it was his endless delight to make toys involving various methods of propulsion.)

However, Ian quickly found that he was rather over specialised for a Navy which had civilianised most of the jobs he might have preferred, and, after a 16-year career, he resigned. This freed him to concentrate on ship simulation where Ian gained a job setting up and running the Cardiff ship simulator at UWIST. From here, in the mid-1980s, it was a short step to setting up his own company innovating with his own ideas for linking several micro-computers (in their infancy) to create much smaller, cheaper and more powerful simulators than the mainframe based models of the big firms such as Marconi, Ferranti and Norcontrol. He also branched out into creating simulators for port craning operations and even into the world of gaming, where he brought a six degree of freedom motion platformed race car gaming simulator to a price and quality point that worked for this industry – way before its time. However, it was not business that drove Ian, it was the mathematical modelling that he pioneered. He partnered with Hydraulics Research of Wallingford, on a consultancy basis, to help design ports by determining the design freedoms for different ships manoeuvring under difficult dynamic conditions. Ever modest and self-effacing of his talents, he described the result of his detailed calculations as simply “go more slowly and use more tugs”. This was a very happy period that took Ian well into his seventies and which he regarded as the most satisfying part of his career. When he knew he was dying he was entirely at peace, feeling that he had been lucky enough to have had an entirely fulfilled life, which he saw to the end in the house he built himself.