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Aviation History
1938
1938 - 2062.PDF
52 FLIGHT. JULY 21, 1938. Fleet Air Arm Maintenance T HE Admiralty is setting about the business of organ ising the Air Branch of the Navy in a very thorough manner On the Service page of this issue arrange ments are set forth for providing for the maintenance of air craft and engines in the Navy. New branches are introduced, air artificer for example, which will correspond to engine room artificer, electrical artificer, and ordnance artificer. Aii fitters and air riggers form a second branch, while the third branch revives the familiar term air mechanic, the "<Jc emma " of the old R.F.C. days. Of course, any business or Government department can in time acquire experts, but they cannot be conjured out of nothing by the waving of a wand. The air branch of the Navy will for some time to come need ample help from the R.A.F. For the present the air artificers and the air fitters and air riggers will have to be trained at R.A.F. schools, though the Admiralty announces its intention of setting up a school for apprentices, evidently on the lines of Halton. For the present the Air Ministry has agreed to permit the transfer of a certain number of airmen to the air branch of the Navy, which, considering the enor mous recruiting campaign which the Air Ministry is now undertaking, is quite a public-spirited action. Evidently the Air Ministry has very loyally accepted the decision of the Cabinet about the transference of the Fleet Air Arm, distasteful as that decision was to the Air Ministry. It is to be hoped, however, that there will not be much more delay in announcing which stations are to be trans ferred from the Air Ministry to the Admiralty. The long delay in making this announcement suggests a lack of unanimity. TooUroom Problem I F the Air Ministry desires that any given new type of aircraft should be ready for delivery in one year from the date of "I.T.P." (instructions to proceed) being received, it is fairly obvious that, assuming the necessary materials and equipment to be available, the major por tion of the tools, pressings, jigs, and so forth, must be completed within six months of the I.T.P. In the case of a medium-size modern type of stressed- skin aeroplane, some 500,000 man hours, probably, are required to make the necessary tools and jigs for produc tion. To make the whole of this equipment in the firm's own works in six months would mean a tool-room staff of some 400 hands. Assuming that the particular aeroplane remained in production some three to four years, after the first six months only about a fifth of the number of tool-room hands would be needed, chiefly to deal with tool maintenance and replacement. The other four-fifths would have to be discharged and a certain amount of plant be left idle. In. practice, it would be almost impossible to have such fluctuating employment of highly skilled labour, especially outside the main engineering labour districts. It is so economically unsound that no firm in the aircraft industry attempts it. Present Procedure W HAT is actually done is that the tooling-up of a new type is spread over a much longer period than six months, so that the tool-room staff is kept constantly employed, while tool manufacture is also sub contracted to smaller outside firms. This method is not altogether satisfactory, and the majority of firms take from one to two years to complete the tooling-up of a new type, with, of course, a corre sponding delay in the commencement of deliveries. Also, with the present Air Ministry method of ordering com plete aircraft of a given type from more than one manu facturer, an unnecessary duplication of press tools occurs, with a corresponding waste of specialised labour. DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS—PAGE 66. Practical Suggestion O NE who is closely in touch with current production problems suggests that these difficulties could be overcome by the establishment of a tool shadow factory. It would be divided into tnYee self-contained sections, (a) press tools, (b) making of pressings, and (c) jigs, fixtures and gauges. If we assume that some six new types of aircraft go into production each year, then this shadow factory would need to employ some 2,000 hands on tools, jigs and gauges in addition to those required in the making of pressings. If such a scheme were to work efficiently it would be essential for the Air Ministry to space out their I.T.P.s as uniformly as possible over the year, so that the resources of the new shadow factory could be utilised to help first one firm and then the next as required. The suggestion has attractive features. The equipment could be very comprehensive, and highly paid, skilled specialists could be employed to supervise the designing and manufacture of the best tools for a given purpose and the most economical methods of manufacturing them. A big load would be taken off the shoulders of constructors' pro duction engineers; production would be speeded up ; and in cases where a new type was made in a number of different factories, the difficulties of making the various details inter changeable would be minimised. Team Work * NY performance which beats the prophecies of Jules l\ Verne always captures the imagination of the public. J. JL His scientific forecasts seemed so very wild when they were written, and now, compared with facts, they seem so tamely lacking in imagination. Round the world in four days—it would once have made the title of a book for the fourth form boy, at which his master would have frowned as a waste of time, and now it merely records a fact—even if Howard Hughes' achievement last week was not a '' circling'' of the globe within the usually under stood meaning of that term. The modern fourth form boy is of a very enquiring turn of mind, and he is probably asking himself what lessons have been taught by the great flight of Hughes and his crew. It has proved that human beings can rise to great endurance; we knew that before. It has proved that aero engines will go on running for very long periods without failure ; we knew that before. It has proved that aircraft are better than they were a few years ago ; we know that such improvement is continuous. This last consideration is the most significant. With the steady improvement of the machine and the engine, even,' air record stands to be lowered so soon as a first-class pilot attacks it with a machine better than the machine which set up the record. From that point of view, the flight achieved by Hughes was a thing to be expected, and most probably a lowering of the Hughes record in due course is also to be expected. The most instructive fact about this flight is that it was team work. The efforts of the solo pilot may have more knight errantry about them, but the future of air transport does not depend on that sort of effort. What a team can do may soon be a regular feature of an airways company's schedule. Gliding C >T week's National Gliding Contests—fully reported elsewhere in this issuer—have focused attention on the sport of motorless flying. Willy-nilly, its de votees have been dragged before newsreel cameras and microphones. The progress of the competitions has been recorded at some length in most of the papers with a surprising degree of accuracy. The duration record by Murray and Sproule aroused a good deal of public admiration, but otherwise the popular reaction seems to have been somewhat negative. For this the gliding fraternity may be grateful. Nothing would be worse for the movement than a "popularisation" °' the kind which overtook M. Mignet's odd little aeroplane
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