My dad, Pete Masters, who has died aged 78, worked his way up from being a gas and pipe fitter with Shell to a position as a senior research technician, in which role he worked on many large-scale experiments in a small team that held a world-leading position in combustion science.
After the 1988 Piper Alpha oil platform disaster in the North Sea, Pete and the team conducted research in the hills of Derbyshire into improving offshore safety by constructing scaled-down sections of platforms, which they filled with gas and ignited. These experiments contributed in the early 1990s to the design and construction of the state-of-the-art Troll A natural gas platform, one of the largest and most complex engineering projects in history.
