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Aviation History
1921
1921 - 0020.PDF
of which can be left until to-njprrow. In the mean- time, the Government, feeling that something has got to be done to keep people quiet, hands out a dole of £60,000 to assist in keeping alive an industry upon which we shall have to depend again for our very national existence when next we become involved in war. We quite appreciate that there is a strong current of opinion which holds that there cannot be another great war for a couple of generations. We quite agree that the main lesson of the last war was that war does not pay either the victors or the vanquished. But we also cannot get away from another basic fact, which is that such considerations as these do not and never have influenced nations in making or refraining from war. There will always be wars, and the best manner of bringing them about is by being weak and unprepared for defence. Unless we are prepared we are simply inviting attack, and unless civil aviation is encouraged to the point at which it can provide us with sufficient reserves for i;he fighting Service we must remain unprepared. We would commend to the earnest consideration of the Government the extract we published a week ago, from the Report of the United States Advisory Com- mittee on Aviation. If that, added to the irrefutable arguments which hive been adduced by British authorities, will not convince the Government that a strong and virile reserve air force is not worth more than a beggarly £60,000—not even £60,000 a year—then they will be convinced by nothing in this world. -.--;'• • • •-.•••..•'. Economy is a very good horse indeed," Economy " but it fe possible to ride it to death in the . 11 1 .. ., R.A.F. -A- verY well-known authority on avia- tion, who is largely interested in the future development of flight, recently gave us some of his views on a number of questions relating to the movement, Service and civilian. He was especially severe on the measures of so-called economy which are being applied to both sides of aviation. Asked for his views regarding civil aviation and its position, he tersely summed up the situation in a single word : " Rotten." He was particularly critical of the present administration of _the R.A.F. As he pointed out, there is an elaborate and apparently sound system of training units for the R.A.F. in being. It is costly, but worth the money if well and truly carried out. The trouble begins later, since it is a fact, he says—and this is borne out by our own information—that while cadets are given an excellent and thorough primary training, the fully fledged R.A.F. pilot is now, practically speaking, kicking his heels. Little or no useful practice flying is done at the stations, such as night-flying, cross-country work and so on. If this is true—as we believe it to be—it would seem that we are spending a lot of money in giving the cadet a good and useful training in the first place, only to throw it away later by allowing the pilots of the Force no opportunity of improving as practical aviators or even of keeping up the relatively high standard which is insisted upon in their initial training. All this, of course, is happening in the sacred name of economy. It is only what is to be expected of a system which throws away millions on the salaries of Whitehall and starves the useful Services for money. Better that money should be found so that not a Treasury clerk may lose his job than that the bureaucrats should have to JANUARY 13, 1921 do a day's work for a day's pay in order that we may have efficient fighting Services on which the safety of the Empire may again depend ! The remedies suggested for the present state of things are, it is suggested, that the Government should carry out a full programme of experimental work which would ensure that the best pilots would get plenty of useful experience of the work which is the nearest approximation to war flying in time of peace. Then, every R.A.F. pilot who has completed his full course of training should be passed to a species of civilian reserve, the work of which should be aerial mail carrying and the conveyance of pas- sengers and goods. These services should not be conducted by the Government—with the telephone ramp so close to us we none of us want to see Govern- ment administration of any public commercial service—but by civil enterprises to whom the pilots would be lent for a period of duty. From time to time these pilots would be called back to the R.A.F. for instruction and practice in war flying at R.A.F. stations. There may be nothing that is particularly new in these suggestions, but they are nevertheless well worthy of consideration, since they, at all events, embody the ideas of one who is very competent to speak and are eminently common-sense in their bearing. • • • Are we getting near to the time when . .A . the whole of the fighting Services will 5£S ? be grouped under a single Ministry of Defence 1 We are impelled to ask the question because of what we consider a very signi- ficant announcement which appeared in The Times the other day. A short paragraph from the Parlia- mentary correspondent of that journal set forth that the Army and Air Estimates for next year have been before the Finance Committee of the Cabinet, but have both been referred back to their respective Ministries for reconsideration. The view of the Government is understood to be that these and the • Navy Estimate; should be dealt with as a whole and not as separate entities. It also seems to be thought, the paragraph continues, that considerable economies might be effected if the framers of the Estimates were to subject them to a critical revision, as the not unnatural tendency is to adopt a generous rather than a parsimonious scale in the first draft of Estimates. We do not remember ever having heard of Esti- mates for the Services being referred back on these grounds before. We can understand in present circumstances their being referred back on the ground of excessive demands upon the purse of the nation, but that they should go back in order that all three may be considered as a whole is something new to us, Hence we have been prompted to ask the question with which we began this article. For a long time now it has been said that there is a powerful section of opinion, both inside and without Government circles, which favours the idea of creating a central Ministry of Defence, with Under-Secretaries, respon- sible to the Minister, for the Navy, the Army, and the Air. The matter has been discussed in most of its bearings, but we do not seem to think that anything approaching unanimity of opinion has been secured. That this should be we can readily understand, because there are very many apparently unanswer- able arguments to be adduced in favour of centralising 20
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