Aeronautical engineer William Milliken dies

William F. Milliken Jr., a renowned aeronautical engineer, pilot and road racer who helped dream up a car-flying James Bond movie stunt, died July 28 at his home in Williamsville, N.Y. He was 101. He had complications from an enlarged prostate, said his son Doug Milliken.

As an engineer for Boeing during World War II, Milliken conducted perilous high-altitude flight tests aboard the B-17 bomber and also helped develop the B-29, later used to drop the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Later, he became one of the world's foremost researchers on vehicle dynamics, the study of improving how a car handles on the road by using mathematical calculations.

He wrote a book on vehicle dynamics that is considered the bible of Formula 1 race car design, and he was a consulting engineer to General Motors, Rolls-Royce, Ford, Bridgestone and Goodyear.

His work as an engineer was taken all the more seriously by clients because of his extensive experience as a race-car driver and pilot.

That Milliken lived past 100 was remarkable considering the number of plane and car crashes he had survived in the name of science and his own thirst for adrenaline.

As a teenager, he designed and built out of canoe wood an airplane powered by a 27-horsepower motorcycle engine. During flight testing, he crashed the unstable plane on a beach in Maine, flipping the aircraft on its back in the sand.

Despite the accident, Milliken said he was compelled to pursue a career in the dynamics of flight as an aeronautical engineer.

One of Milliken's successes in high-speed car driving was his role helping to design a stunt for the 1974 James Bond film starring Roger Moore, "The Man With the Golden Gun."

For many years, Milliken worked as a senior engineer at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, a research facility in Buffalo associated with Cornell University.

In the late 1960s, some of the more imaginative scientists under Milliken's purview began running computer experiments on how to flip a car in midair using ramps. The researchers, using complex mathematical calculations, proved it was possible and invited a test driver to try it out.

The resulting barrel-roll move was employed by Moore's 007 secret agent during a car chase scene filmed in Thailand in a single take.