FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1946
1946 - 0343.PDF
FEBRUARY 2IST, I946 FLIGHT 181 a indicator" Discusses Topics of the Day Length and Breadth The Heathrow Controversy : The Importance of Directional Variety x A Brabazon Anomaly IT is so very easy to be sarcastically destructive aboutanything and to write "open letters" to people whoare not at all in a position to answer them that Iam wondering whether it is quite fair to add to the thousands of words which have already been written aboutour old friend Heathrow. Were it possible to be in several hundred places and to read several hundred minds at thesame time, it would be much more easy to take honest advantage of one's privileged position as a producer ofletterpress and to lay down the law about this and that with a clear conscience. As it is, the consciences of writers can remain tolerablyquiescent in the knowledge that elephants, however white, are extraordinarily strong animals and are prone to pro-ceed in a straight line regardless of the arrows of their enemies. They may, however, be stopped quite dead sometimesby a single large-calibre projectile. And my projectile may be considered as large because, following Einsteinic reason-ing, it is aimed at an even larger target than the Heath- row elephant. It is aimed, in fact, at most of the run way edairfields that have been laid down in this country. While everybody has been getting so excited about theneed for new and enormous terminal buildings, or for longer and better taxying tracks and runways, or for moreand more concrete to take the weight of bigger and better aircraft, only one or two critics—those with personalexperience of the practical conduction of large aircraft— appear to have seen the only real red light. Briefly, the six landing directions provided by the nowstandard three-runway arrangement are not enough for present-day aircraft, and will certainly not be enough forany future giants. You may have the longest runways in the world andyou may duplicate or even multiply them until the entire airfield looks like an inebriate's heaven, but sheer lengthor multiplication will not alter the fact that the chosen lines may, at any moment, be as much as 30 degrees outof a 60-mile-an-hour wind. Four Run-ways a Minimum Ever since runways were first invented, and certainlyduring the war when more or less standardised airfields were laid down by various contractors in hundreds, theplain triangle, with or without an encircling perimeter track, has been, so to speak, an accepted fact, and I can-not help feeling that the sooner we are able to think in terms of an absolute minimum of four runways the betterit will be. Although it is quite true that an experienced aircraft captain has little difficulty in competing with cross-ly wind arrivals, and that, due to its considerable momen- ^tmn, a heavy aircraft can generally be more easily landedacross wind, there is a very definite limit to the success of the technique employed, and the kind of ground-loopingrisks which were happily taken with bombers and trans- ports during a war cannot decently be repeated in peace-time. For the moment, the medium-large aircraft in ordinaryuse can, in fact, be handled fairly safely in cross-wind con- ditions, but we are still asking a very great deal of thepilot; and as sizes and weights increase, the stresses in- volved in correcting incipient swings during take-offs orlandings will be more than the tyres and undercarriages can be expected to take. Furthermore, all aircraft arenot equally easy to handle, either in a drift-neutralising attitude or in a last-minute straighen-out from a crabbing approach, and even the natural qualities of the tricycleundercarriage will not save the airframe from excessive loadings if an aircraft is put down with drift. On many occasions during the war, even with threeavailable runways and a comparatively clear conscience as far as crash risks were concerned, pilots have found itnecessary to abandon a take-off or to make for another air- field with a more suitable runway because the amount ofdrift just could not be tolerated. At one moment at least, when taking off a four-engined type with a very greatdeal of fin area, I found myself half-way down a runway while still holding full rudder and quite unable to bringup either of the starboard throttles sufficiently far to become airborne. The take-off was inevitably abandonedat a considerable cost in brake linings and nerves. Yet the runway was the best of three, and the wind was notexcessively strong—it just happened to be as far off the runway as it was possible for it to be. Tricycle a Help Of course, the increasing standardisation of the direc-tionally stable tricycle will help very considerably, par- ticularly where take-offs are concerned; but, at least inthis country, the majority of our civil aircraft are likely to be conventionally undercarriaged for at least the nexttwo years. And there are many occasions during a normal year when neither take-offs nor landings are safely pos-sible at any one particular airfield, and many more occa- sions when they are fraught with more than a reasonableamount of minor risk. Nearly everybody, in saying their pieces about Heath-row, have been primarily concerned with its ability to deal with very large amounts of traffic and with future aircraftrequiring immensely long landing and take-off runs. Yet it seems to me that an additional three thousand-yardrunway will be far more useful than either a three-thousand yard extension of an existing runway or a duplicate in thesame direction. In normal conditions of weather, aircraft can be landed and taken off quite as expeditiously as isat present necessary, even with the conventional Service airfield layout, provided that the control personnel areup to the job, while in bad weather it would never, in any case, be possible to permit, say, an aircraft to approachone runway on S.B.A. while any other aircraft was pre- paring to take off from a parallel runway. Only the Idle-wild tangential runway scheme would make this possible •—and such a scheme, in useful form, would be moreexpensive and expansive than anything we can at present contemplate. Those who have watched American squadrons comingin after an operation will know just how tightly packed the arriving aircraft can be, with well disciplined and ex-perienced captains. The difficulty during such perform- ances was always that of breaking up the circus momen-tarily while an aircraft was allowed to take-off. Here, admittedly, the parallel runway arrangement would, ingood weather, be a convenience, but it should certainly not yet be a necessity in the present density of civil airtraffic. If I were asked to make a decision on priorities inairfield planning I would go first for the provision of a maximum number of landing directions, and then forreally adequate terminal buildings, for runway extensions and, finally, for runway duplication and rational taxytrack development. The tangential scheme is, eventu- ally, the obvious one, but who is going to pay for it and
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
