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Aviation History
1940
1940 - 0468.PDF
-144 fifi? FEBRUARY 15, 1940 H.M. THE KING IN WEST-LAND : Recently King George VI reaffirmed his intense interest in the Royal Air Force and its equipment by making, accompanied by the Queen, a tour of the West of England. His Majesty is here seen having the mysteries of a Lysander explained to him by Mr. W. E. W. Petter. Overseas Markets." In that article the author pleaded for support to enable those aircraft constructors who could do so to be allowed to export aircraft. Little pro- gress' has been made towards getting the authorities to relent their obstructionist attitude. Then we called attention to the need for looking ahead, and suggested that the Civil Aviation Development Com- mittee should be formed in accordance with the recom- mendations made by the Brown Committee before the war. And last week we pointed out that the present tendency seems to be towards the view that at the end of the war some of our military aircraft could be con- verted for commercial use. To that we replied that this seemed to us the wrong way to set about it. Present NeedsJ UDGING by the tone of Imperial's letter to the Chamber of Commerce, there is, obviously, no time to wait until British designers and constructors can produce new aircraft. Unless something is done, and done quickly, not even the Empire air services will be carried on, or at least only in an attenuated and unsatis- factory form, due to lack of equipment. We are already buying far more aeroplanes from America than we ought to buy, and one hesitates to suggest swelling the already frightening total even by an order for twenty commercial aeroplanes. But there seems to be nothing for it but to buy abroad. Not necessarily in America ; Italy has produced some very serviceable and fast commercial aircraft, and an order for such a relatively small number might be more in keeping with the productive capacity of the Italian air- craft industry than the orders for military aircraft which Flight suggested recently might well be placed there. A.M. or B.O.T.?W E on Flight have never hitherto held the view that the control of civil aviation should be taken away from the Air Ministry and given to the Board of Trade, but after the way the Air Ministry has mishandled commercial aviation one does begin to wonder if that is not the only way of ensuring that com- mercial aviation shall have a fair deal. Germany, it is pointed out, does not permit her air routes to be curtailed. There was a certain amount of interruption during the early days of the war, but since, then she has done everything possible to re-establish and even extend her air route net so that German business men can travel as quickly as possible to those countries with which Germany trades. We are not unmindful of the fact that while he was at the G.P.O., and since he has been at the Air Ministry, Sir Kingsley Wood did wonderful work for the "All- mails-by-air" scheme. But, as we have said before, he has too much to do already, and the Director-General of Civil Aviation seems to have become a voice crying in the wilderness, and not very effectively at that. Had Sir Sefton Brancker been alive he would assuredly have made his voice heard, no matter how loudly others might clamour for military aircraft.
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