Brinda: Your memoirs, The Cry of the Eagle: The Life & Times of an Aerospace Engineer, (www.trafford.com/08-0858), describes you as a “restless” engineer. Please explain.
Parvez: From an early age my family was on the move. We first moved during partition, when we had to move in a hurry, from Lahore to Delhi. We drove for two days in an army truck. Later we travelled from Delhi to Shimla and then to Nanking in China, only to be evacuated back to Delhi when the Chinese Communists took over. Perhaps the most stable time were my years in Sanawar (1949-1955). I guess by this time the “restless” spirit was beginning to be part of me even if forced onto my family by circumstances beyond our control. From Sanawar to London (England) and then, after graduating as an Aeronautical Engineer, a constantly challenging career in England, Europe (The Netherlands and France) and Canada. I always became restless once the challenges in any job had been overcome. This typically happened every three years and the urge to seek out more adventures had me moving again and again. My curriculum vitae reads like a thick book!
Q. Your odyssey spanning technological progress from biplanes to space stations is perhaps unique. Could you elaborate on this please?
A. As a young boy to be able to fly like a bird fascinated me. Aeroplanes were piston-engined in those days and my first flight was in a 4-engined passenger aircraft from Calcutta to Shanghai belonging to Pan American World Airways. At Sanawar, I used to go to Harprit Singh Gill’s Workshop (he used of a small room behind the Gym in the Boy’s Department) where he would be making model aircraft and us younger fans would follow him around as he launched them towards Kasauli, and then run to fetch them back for him once they fell back to the ground a short distance away. I went out to Palam Airport in Delhi to watch the very first de Havilland Comet Jetliner land and take-off.
As a schoolboy in England I attended every Farnborough Air Show in the 1950's where the latest civil and military aircraft were displayed for the world to view. As you can see, aeroplanes began to be part of my life and becoming an aeronautical engineer was a natural evolution from there. I learned to fly gliders when I was at Imperial College and later obtained my Pilot’s Licence for powered aircraft at the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield. I could hop out of a glider and immediately fly a powered aircraft, or vice versa, with no trouble at all! Designing aircraft in industry, doing research in aerodynamics in academia, and then joining the Civil Aviation Authorities in the UK and Canada to certify and participate in test flights of aircraft ranging from biplanes dating back to the 1940's, through the small and big jumbo jets, to helicopters and the Concorde supersonic aircraft was truly an Odyssey in Time!
Q.Tell us about your spearheading Canada’s participation in the International Space Station Programme and of an Old Sanawarian training Astronauts in a foreign country.
A.I started my space career in Canada in 1982 by being hired by the National Research Council to spearhead the country’s participation and role in the International Space Station Programme. Being Canada’s representative on NASA’s Space Station Concept Development Group was a challenge I took to easily and I stayed with the space programme, in one role or another, for the next two decades! I guess, with new challenges cropping up every day, I certainly was not getting bored anymore. I pioneered many “firsts” in the Canadian Space Programme culminating in being the first Astronaut Training Officer of the Canadian Astronaut Programme, as well as their Deputy Director. Yes - here was an OS training the very best to do their jobs even better! Even NASA and the European Space Agency requested that they be allowed to use parts of my “Basic Training Programme for Astronauts” in their own such programmes. I was proud to have been of some use after all!
Q. You have written a whole chapter on Sanawar in your book. But what has intrigued me is that you chose aeronautics as a career when the school did not even teach Calculus and Coordinate Geometry!
A.That is true, and my first years at school in London were very hard having to catch up on my mathematical and analytical capabilities. But once there, the rest easily fell into place particularly when the sky above beckoned me by calling “come and fly!” Learning to fly, designing “flying machines” and then test flying them, to ensure that future passengers in them were safe, was an evolutionary process. Having reached for the sky successfully, the next frontier beckoning me was Space. But, I must admit, that if I were to take the Senior Cambridge (or equivalent graduating exam at Sanawar) today - I would surely fail! Students now exercise their computers, instead of their brains, and I am far behind them on that front.
Q. What is it like to experience Zero-Gravity? They say that it is one of fifty things people should experience in their lifetime!.
A.Experiencing zero-gravity is an ethereal feeling! My childhood desires to be able to fly like a bird was finally fulfilled! There are no stresses on the body, there is a feeling of complete relaxation, and one can easily become addicted to it! I know that I am not the only Zero-G-Junky around.
Q.Is space the final frontier for man or is there another world? Will it become home to future generations?.
A.There are many “worlds” out there in the Universe just waiting to be explored, and...Yes - they may be inhabited one day in the future by humankind! One of my biggest challenges was giving lectures to final year engineering students at a University in the mornings and then teach Kindergarten Classes at a Junior School in the afternoons enthusing the young ones to take up engineering as a profession and continue to explore even further than I ever did! After all it is the spirit of adventure that keeps us young!