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Aviation History
1940
1940 - 1658.PDF
JUNE 6, 1940 LOOKING FORWARD (CONTINUED) The story of British civil aviation in the years preceding the outbreak of hostilities is punctuated by reports of com- mittees set up by the Government to enquire into various aspects of civil aviation. Their most important recom- mendations were accepted, and some of these were so im- portant that they defined the basis on which the future was to be built. The first of these was the Gorell Committee, which re- commended in 1934 that '' the control of airworthiness of civil aircraft should be devolved from the Air Ministry " to an executive authority, which was established in 1937 and known as the Air Registration Board. It has control over aircraft up to io.ooolb. and carrying 10 passengers. The Maybury Committee reported in 1936 that internal airlines could be made to pay if competition were restricted, and made a recommendation which was subsequently im- plemented that an Air Transport Licensing Authority be established. The third Committee under Lord Cadman made a com- prehensive and far-reaching review of British civil aviation in 1938 and they viewed " with extreme disquiet " the posi- tion revealed to them. "In our view," they said, "the problem of the air is one—two sides of a single coin—and the military aspect of aviation cannot fundamentally be separated from the civil aspect." The phrase rather sug- gests that the characteristic of the coin significant in the simile is the proximity of its sides, but the committee's subsequent development of the theme suggests that they also appreciated the fact that the two sides face in opposite directions. The indisputable facts are that crvil and military aeroplanes are designed for dia- metrically opposite purposes, peace and war, the scientific and technical problems raised by civil and military requirements are often the same. These facts suggest that the directions of civil and mili- tary aviation should, like the directions of mercantile and naval marine, be in different hands, but that these director- ates must be co-ordinated to avoid duplication of research. To emphasise this by an obvious example, the economics of air transport and the efficiency of fighters require very different training and experience for their attainments, but both demand the reduction of aerodynamic drag to a mini- mum—a single scientific problem. The Cadman recommendations called for the strengthen- ing of the civil aviation staff of the Air Ministry, the ex- pansion of British air routes, the use of British aircraft on them, and the increased subsidisation of civil aviation. This last was done by the increase of the annual subsidy from £xi to £3 million, and the British Overseas Airways Corporation was formed by amalgamation. The last of the committees, with Mr. Harold Brown as chairman, reported in April, 1939, on "how best to im- prove co-ordination between aircraft constructors, airline operators and the Air Ministry in the production of civil air liners." The committee summarised the various bodies concerned with aeronautical research and development work here—the Air Ministry, the Aerodynamics Depart- ment of the National Physical Laboratory, the Air Regis- tration Board, the Aeronautical Research Committee, tht technical staffs of firms and certain University workers— and concluded that almost the whole effort of these bodies was directed primarily to problems of military aviation. The committee, not surprisingly, found this state of affairs most unsatisfactory. In comparison with the organisation of the Civil Aeronautics Authority in the United States, it must have appeared little short of tragic to them. They concluded that British civil aviation would stand a chance of occupying a leading position in world civil avia- tion only if large sums of public money were spent on it. Assuming the money to be forthcoming, the Brown Com- mittee suggested that the co-ordination they regarded as essential could best be provided by an advisory committee called the Civil Aviation Development Committee. By the beginning of the war, the Government had made some pro- gress in the appointment of this committee, but what their plans for financial assistance were had not been disclosed. The Initial War Period The work of the committees produced the Air Registra- tion Board, the Directorate of Civil Research and Produc- tion of the Air Ministry, the Air Transport Licensing Authority, and the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Of these, the Board continues with a reducef. staff to look after the technical needs of the war-withered body of civil aviation ; the Directorate has ceased to exist, and its vigor- ous Director is directing something else ; the Authority has also gone ; but the Corporation, though beset with diffi- culties, is very much alive and, I am glad to see, kicking. Summarising the reports of the Committees, they reveal the realisation that civil aviation cannot be self-support- ing. the belief that to give British civil aviation its proper place in the world, large expenditure of public money (which would, however, look trivial when compared with war expenditure) is necessary, a tendency to separate the governance of civil from that of military aviation, BRITISH OPERATED ROUTES (SEPT. 1939) FOREIGN OPERATED ROUTES (SEPT. 1939) Fig. 2. Principal air routes joining the Empire and other countries.
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