{"id":41278,"date":"2018-08-09T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T20:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=41278"},"modified":"2018-08-08T18:58:49","modified_gmt":"2018-08-08T08:58:49","slug":"vince-di-pietro-us-australia-relationship-brings-big-benefits-to-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/vince-di-pietro-us-australia-relationship-brings-big-benefits-to-both\/","title":{"rendered":"Vince Di Pietro: US\u2013Australia relationship brings big benefits to both"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

The conference rooms scattered through Lockheed Martin Australia\u2019s headquarters in Canberra are each named after high-achieving scientists and other thinkers and doers\u2014and they\u2019re all Australians. That was done deliberately to highlight the fact that the flow of top-quality engineering and ideas between the American giant and its local arm goes both ways.<\/p>\n

\u2018Australian inventors have changed the course of humankind\u2019, says the US corporation\u2019s chief executive in Australia, Vince Di Pietro.<\/p>\n

Those who\u2019ve loaned their names to conference rooms include Ruby Payne-Scott, an outstanding physicist and global pioneer in the fields of radio astronomy and radio physics who, during World War II, was involved in secret work on radar. In 1951, she was forced out of what is now the CSIRO because she was pregnant and was found also to have been secretly married.<\/p>\n

Another is David Unaipon, a brilliant Indigenous inventor born on a remote mission station in 1872, whose ideas provided the basis for modern sheep shears. Before World War I, he studied the principles that make a boomerang fly to produce drawings for a type of helicopter. Because of the depth and range of his ideas, he was referred to as Australia\u2019s Leonardo da Vinci. His portrait features on the $50 note.<\/p>\n

Another room is named after yachtsman and marine architect Ben Lexcen. He designed Australia II with its winged keel, which won the America\u2019s Cup in 1983.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Graeme Clark, who developed the cochlear implant which has allowed hundreds of thousands of deaf people around the world to hear.<\/p>\n

Fiona Wood, the British-born Australian plastic surgeon who invented spray-on skin to treat burns victims, has a room.<\/p>\n

David Warren, a scientist with Australia\u2019s Aeronautical Research Laboratory, invented the \u2018black box\u2019 flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, which have aided air crash investigators and so saved thousands of lives by preventing avoidable disasters. There\u2019s an ironic twist in the black box saga: in its early days, the Americans were offered a demonstration and turned it down.<\/p>\n

John O\u2019Sullivan, an electrical engineer, was a key member of the CSIRO team that invented WiFi.<\/p>\n

Anaesthetist and cardiologist Dr Mark Cowley Lidwill invented the pacemaker. Doctors George Kossoff and David Robinson invented the first grey-scale ultrasound scanner, creating a commercially viable technology that assists countless medical procedures around the globe.<\/p>\n

Aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith is clearly one of Di Pietro\u2019s favourites. In his office is a model of the Lady Southern Cross, the Lockheed Altair monoplane in which Kingsford Smith and his co-pilot, John Thompson Pethybridge,\u00a0disappeared\u00a0in the Andaman Sea while attempting to break the speed record for a flight from England to Australia.<\/p>\n

Di Pietro, a former chief of the Royal Australian Navy\u2019s Fleet Air Arm, loves the links between Kingsford Smith\u2019s aircraft and the two Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighters which flew from the US to Victoria in 2017 for the Avalon air show.<\/p>\n

\u2018It\u2019s a fantastic story\u2019, says the endlessly enthusiastic Di Pietro. \u2018Through significant cooperation of the corporation, the Royal Australian Air Force and the US Air Force, we were able to get the machines out here for the public to see them for the first time.\u2019<\/p>\n

Like the Lady Southern Cross, the two F-35s were each powered by a single Pratt and Whitney engine. They travelled from Luke Air Force Base in Arizona with three stops, in Hawaii, on Guam, and at RAAF Base Amberley in Queensland. They flew to Avalon, did their display at the air show and then did the whole trip again in reverse.<\/p>\n

\u2018When they got back to Luke they\u2019d flown both ways across the Pacific, refuelled 22 times in the air, done an air show and got all the way home with not a single part unserviceable\u2019, says Di Pietro.<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve got 5,000 hours in military aviation, and I can tell you, to fly an aeroplane for a few days without something needing attention or going wrong is quite remarkable. And these flew something like 25,000 miles.\u2019<\/p>\n

He says that soon Australians will get used to seeing F-35s in our skies. \u2018It\u2019s going to be exciting. Kids will say, \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d And parents will say, \u201cIt\u2019s a joint strike fighter\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

Di Pietro says the US is aware of the intellectual potential and inventiveness in Australia and that\u2019s why his company opted to set up its Science Technology Engineering Leadership and Research Laboratory\u2014or STELaR Lab\u2014in Melbourne. Lockheed Martin picked the city for its only such facility outside the US because it viewed it as one of the world\u2019s most advanced university research centres and it recognised Australia as a world leader in fields ranging from engineering and computer science to physics, space science, medical research and molecular biology.<\/p>\n

\u2018Australia\u2019s an amazing place. It\u2019s generated some of the world\u2019s most incredible people and ideas. We seem to know an awful lot about other nation\u2019s incredible people and ideas, but we don\u2019t talk anywhere near enough about our own\u2019, he says.<\/p>\n

\u2018Consider someone like Fiona Wood being inspired by tragedy to think of plastic skin, and all of the suffering that step outside the box has saved people. Think of Professor Clark\u2019s bionic ear, and how many people\u2019s lives that\u2019s changed. And the continuing impact of ultrasound and pacemakers and WiFi as everyday imprints on humankind. Our Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, is a world leader in quantum technology.\u2019<\/p>\n

These are most inspiring people, Di Pietro says, and their stories need to be front of mind in every Australian and the seeds of attraction to STEM and its part in tackling big challenges for every young Australian.<\/p>\n

He notes that Kingsford Smith predicted his achievements would pave the way for intercontinental flight to one day become routine.<\/p>\n

\u2018Now, people fly across the globe, and someone will say: \u201cOh, my baggage got lost.\u201d And I sit there quietly thinking that you\u2019ve just been across the world in a flying machine made of aluminium one-sixteenth of an inch thick. You\u2019ve had two gin and tonics, watched three movies and had a sleep, safe from the ever-thinning air when you\u2019re flying at 40,000 feet. And the biggest problem in your life is the fact that your bag\u2019s late?\u2019<\/p>\n

Di Pietro gestures towards his hero\u2019s 1934 monoplane. \u2018And this guy in that machine, single engine across the Pacific, what could possibly go wrong? Extraordinary stuff. Extraordinary \u2026 \u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The conference rooms scattered through Lockheed Martin Australia\u2019s headquarters in Canberra are each named after high-achieving scientists and other thinkers and doers\u2014and they\u2019re all Australians. That was done deliberately to highlight the fact that the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":587,"featured_media":41280,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[271,722,2262,332],"class_list":["post-41278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-f-35","tag-innovation","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVince Di Pietro: US\u2013Australia relationship brings big benefits to both | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/vince-di-pietro-us-australia-relationship-brings-big-benefits-to-both\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Vince Di Pietro: US\u2013Australia relationship brings big benefits to both | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The conference rooms scattered through Lockheed Martin Australia\u2019s headquarters in Canberra are each named after high-achieving scientists and other thinkers and doers\u2014and they\u2019re all Australians. 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