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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 1961.PDF
37O FLIGHT OCTOBER 4TH, 1945 A.T.A. Farewell An Outstanding Range of Demonstrations at White Waltham ON Saturday at White Waltham it was just as if thelast six years had never been. In miraculously hotsunshine A.T.A.'s farewell pageant might, except for the strangely faster aircraft in evidence, well have beenany S.B.A.C. show or flying garden party of the pre-war years. There was much the same kind of crowd, withmany of the familiar faces. Certainly, no one could have been disappointed by theweather conditions, or by the show put up in aid of the A.T.A. Benevolent Fund. Apart from the exhibited air-crafif*British and German, in the open, and the ex-( Street display of engines', experimental aircraft and auxilLitems, there was admirable "accidental" flying support from all possible quarters. It was quite extraordinary how,on a Saturday afternoon, so many test pilots/^md others should have found it convenient to .proceeAT with theirroutine flying by way of White Waltham, jm to drop in there to be topped-up and otherwise sensed. For theflying part of the display was by way in these cheese-paring days, quite unojof demonstrated aircraft merely arrped i\ tlie sj time and loitered somewhat j^gorously in ti» yicinjty. Newest of the types to j*e seen in the av\arKTo\i thgground were the Bristol Buckmaster—a Centa!\jfus-pow!( twin-engined trainer just at that moment released andjtively flown by Mr. Pegg late in the afternoon—and the Blackburn Firebrand torpedo-fighter, demonstrated by Mr.Richmond while " on his way " to Heston. Unfortunately, perhaps, for the full effect, the Firebrand was not carryinga dummy torpedo; one gathers that its aerobatic per- formance when so loaded is little inferior to that when theaircraft is flying comparatively light. Jet development was represented by the original Gloster,looking very clean with its tricycle tucked up, to be seen in the hangar, and by a flight of three Meteors, led byWing Cdr. Kellett, which made several high-speed : appre hand wa the airfield immediately after the official opening of thepageant by, appropriately enough, the first Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, who was intro-duced by Comdre. D'Erlanger, the A.T.A. Commanding Officer. Unfortunately for representative comparison, theVampire was not shown, but the De Havilland contribution to the war effort was demonstrated in the Mosquito fighter-bomber ^ich, in the hands of a Service test pilot from the Lea\afcden factory, kept the earlier arrivals amusedopening. One-engined flying was the f thisSiisplay, and probably few of these visitorsted the way in which the exceptional single-engined .alities were shown by the fact that the Mosquitod, against all the old safety rules, almost every it"fc.the goo£ engine " on top." Stationary Flying "Next in ordiftr ot public interest was undoubtedly theput upf just in front of the crowd, by Sqn. Ldr. [aVsh, ofypre-war Autogiro fame, with a Sikorsky helicopter-^ifhich looked for all the world like a puzzled fish nosigg*uie glass of an aquarium as it wandered vaguelyit, backwards and forwards, within a few feet of the Aground. Meanwhile, an Autogiro, in the air at the sametime, provided a comparison of old and new ideas in "slow and safe '' flying development. Clean, and as immensely impressive as one would gxpect,was Mr. Henshaw's display %vith a Seafire XV; his "re- versing" upward rolls were a particular delight. Withplenty of initial speed and boost from the Griffon he could manage something like a couple of turns each way. Othermilitary performers were a Lancaster, handled, we guessed, by Mr. Alington from Austin's Elmdon factory, which flewpast first with the two outers feathered and then, more im- pressively still, with the two starboard propellers feathered;-«r*Centaurus-engined Tempest; and a Vickers Warwick. Pleasantly civilian-by contrast was the quartette of Milesaircraft—the Messenger, its short take-off and landing runs adequately shown by Fit. Lt. Rose ; the fast M.28 ; theAerovan in the hands of the designer, Mr. George Miles; and, nicely enough, the Sparrowhawk single-seater. Nr jAuster was flown, but an example on the ground inevitably and probably damagingly suffered continuous investigationby hordes of people. Tow-offs by four types of glider and sailplane, with a running commentary justly provided bythe peacetime expert in such matters, Cdr. Wills, com- pleted the demonstrations of the sort of flying to interestthe future prospective owner. Although the pageant marked the end of the A.T.A. asa flourishing organisation, it seemed to us rather to mark the beginning of the new pejp^ in aviation as the first big-scale air display to be "J. P." RETIRESF IRST member of Flight's original editorial staff to retireunder the age limit is Mr. J. Prochazka, who was chief artist on the journal for a great many years. The initials"J. P." on drawings became synonymous with technical accuracy, and no artist has ever " dissected " aircraft structuresmore successfully. We know that his work was greatly appre- ciated in the aircraft industry as well as by our ordinary readers,and in many drawing offices his sketches of structural details "» were filed for reference. "J. P." joined Flight in 1910, and has thus recorded mour pages the entire progress from the '' stick-and-string' days to the present stressed-skin era. His work was not con-fined to British aircraft, for he dealt faithfully with foreign machines exhibited at Paris, Berlin, Prague, Copenhagen andGothenburg, thus helping very materially in keeping our readers informed of progress abroad. He now proposes to enjoy a well-earned rest, and his col-leagues hope that the easel which has collected dust for some years will again carry some of his very original oil paintings.
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