Remembering Howard Gammon Continued from page 11 as he could be, straightforward and fair; and, he was abso- lutely dedicated to being hardworking and truthful.” It would be difficult to overstate Gammon’s contribu- tions to aviation fuel quality control worldwide: his designs are used in virtually every airport in the world, large and small, as well as fuel terminals and refineries serv- ing airports. He is credited with devising the widely used, simple formula for calculating fluid velocity in a pipe per second (gallons per minute/pipe size squared) x 0.4 = fluid velocity per second. It is often refered to as Gammon’s Formula. And, he served as the longtime Chairman of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) Avgas Subcommittee for so long—as his published obitu- ary notes—“that when he retired from it, no one knew when he had started; no one else had been there that long.” He held at least 10 patents that his son knows of, but for the vast majority of his inventions, he never bothered with the paperwork and expense of applying for patents. “He didn’t think it was important: he’d just make things and never patent them,” Jim Gammon said. “He’d say, ‘Look, if we give great service and a great price, then we don’t need a patent because nobody’s going to bother competing with us.’ I argued with him on it from time to time—I actually have 15 patents of my own—but he just felt it’s an industrial marketplace, not a consumer marketplace, and it’s a different thing. For the most part, he turned out to be right about that.” Howard Gammon’s many inventions and innova- tions may actually be eclipsed by his efforts to edu- cate users about how to use them, and about how to discover and solve their own problems, as evidenced in his popular GamGrams—introduced in 1975 with new issues being produced every year since. “My dad always said that, in aviation fuel handling, the most important thing of all is to keep your eyes open and your brain turned on, always studying, always trying to find the ‘needle in the haystack’, that little bit of infor- mation that tells you something’s wrong,” Jim Gammon explained. “One of the first things I learned from him is that the key to quality control is to look for changes. If anything changes unexpectedly, even if it’s a subtle change, then you may have discovered the tip of an iceberg. He came to the conclusion that most people really didn’t understand the nature of what to look for when handling jet fuel: the problems, the cures, the symptoms. When you Aviation Business Journal | 1st Quarter 2018 see something unusual, you want to know what it means, what’s causing it, why it’s happening. So, he decided to make it his mission to share that information. The GamGrams were purely educational, not promotional. It was never about pushing a product or service. He just wanted people to understand the ‘why.’ Why is this happening? ‘Why’ was always hugely important to my dad. He had a drive to understand how and why things work, and how and why things go wrong, and it was important to him to share that.” He kept that drive throughout his remarkable life. Jim Gammon reported, his father never technically retired, and had an active role in running the company right up to his death. “He got his last patent when he was 82 and kept on working regular hours with us until he was 92, when his health first started to deteriorate,” Jim Gammon said. “He was on the payroll until the day he died we still discussed business regularly. It was his company! What was I going to do, tell him to retire? My dad’s philosophy was very, very simple: life is work. Whether you’re raising a family, working at a business, mowing the lawn, doing a hobby…he considered everything to be work and he didn’t see anything wrong with that. He really didn’t care much for downtime, and he never had any real interest in retiring. ‘You have to do something!’ He didn’t even really enjoy watching TV until he was in his 90s, and only then to keep his mind engaged with things he wanted to learn more about. He was a Grade A, Class A, Type A personality to the very end, a workaholic. He was always very serious from his youth. He’d set goals and achieve them. He’d tackle problems and solve them. That’s just who he was. There might never be another one like him in this industry, so we’re all very grate- ful that he’d already solved a lot of our big problems.” 13
