He was employed first at Rolls-Royce where he worked on the earliest designs such as the Welland and Derwent, and later at Bristol Aero Engines where he helped bring the troubled Proteus turboprop and the Olympus turbojet to market.
Stanley George Hooker was born at Sheerness, the son of a farm labourer who had earlier been a licensed victualler, and educated at Borden Grammar School.
He became more interested in aerodynamics, won the Busk studentship in aeronautics in 1928 and moved to Brasenose College, Oxford where he received his DPhil in this area in 1935.
The same year the Air Ministry made a request for a turbocharged Merlin for use in the planned high altitude Wellington VI bomber.
The Merlin 61 arrived in time to give the Spitfire a desperately needed advantage in rate of climb and service ceiling over the Focke-Wulf Fw 190.
One major outcome of his work introduced a generalised method of predicting and comparing aircraft engine performance under flight conditions.
Hooker was excited, and in turn brought Rolls-Royce chairman Ernest Hives to visit Rover's factory in Barnoldswick.
On his return to England he decided that Rolls should recapture the power lead, and in 1944 the team started development of a larger version of the Derwent that was delivered as the 5,500 lbf (24,000 N) Nene.
While this proved to be a successful design, it was not used widely on British aircraft, and Rolls eventually sold a licence to the United States, and later, several engines to the Soviet Union, which then went on to copy it unlicensed.
This set off a major political row, and soon the MiG-15, powered by a Klimov VK-1 (a copy of the Nene), was outperforming anything America or Britain had to counter it.
However, a near-fatal accident with Britannia G-ALRX in February 1954, due to a spur gear failure, prompted a telephone call from his old boss Hives, who subsequently sent his top team of Rolls-Royce jet engineers, among them Elliott, Rubbra, Lovesey, Lombard, Haworth and Davies, to give Hooker some desperately needed help.
In 1952, Hooker was asked by the Folland company whether he could produce a 5,000 lbf (22 kN) thrust engine to power their new lightweight fighter, the Gnat.
[12][9] Hooker was made responsible for technical supervision of the four gas turbine divisions and was leading a Rolls-Royce effort to improve both power and fuel consumption of the engine.
[12] Hooker was immediately appointed to the board of the new nationalised company, Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd.[14] As technical director, he provided the expertise, drive and energy to lead and inspire the team, including drawing in old colleagues (some long retired), to rectify the problems and soon the RB.211 was in production.
In the late 1980s, test pilot Bill Bedford gave a talk in Christie's auction room in South Kensington in London.
In a television series produced by Johnathan Lewis, Sir Kenneth Keith stated: 'I always thought that Stanley was a near-genius.