Uffa enthusiastically pursued the idea. He experimented with the idea of a folding boat to be carried inside the bomb bay of an aircraft. Uffa writes about this in his book ‘Joys of Life’. He built cardboard and then scale wooden models for the 20′ folding boat which was unfolded by the action of the parachutes during the descent. He took this idea, through personal relationships, to the ‘powers that be’ and inspected the likely carrier plane – a Hudson.
During this inspection on Thorney Island, it became clear that there was too little room inside the bomb bay. However, Bob Dickerson, Uffa’s foreman fitter, saw a torpedo being carried underneath the plan and suggested a lifeboat could be carried in the same way.
Uffa and his team then worked to develop a lifeboat with a more conventional hull and lines shared with the Air Ministry in early 1942.