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Aviation History
1946
1946 - 0364.PDF
192 FLIGHT FEBRUARY 2IST, 1945 CIVIL AVIATION Speed was the supreme asset of air transport, and although British air services were already providing rapid travel to such places as Australia, India and Egypt, we were, nevertheless, on the threshold of dramatic increases in speed. The prospect of speeds which would bring Australia within 24 hours of London, New York within 6 hours, and Johannesburg within 14 hours were within known possibility, even if that possibility was still distant. These speeds brought new problems, such as those con- cerned in pressurisation for flying at great heights. They also involved problems of space and time in relation to human needs. He instanced the complexity of the meal arrangements made for passengers leaving London at lunch time and arriving in New York at lunch time the same day! Comfort in the air was a question of relativity. There were many things that airline operators would like to give passengers, but they all affected performance and cost. There was a tendency to confuse comfort with luxury. Lord Knollys agreed, however, that the longer the con- tinuous air journey, the greater the comfort needed. It was no good transporting people by air from England to Australia in three days if a further 24 hours was to elapse after arrival before they were fit to undertake business or to enjoy themselves. To make passengers comfortable on voyages of several thousands of miles, with perhaps three sets of climatic conditions ranging from very cold to highly tropical, was an involved task. Air Travel for All So far as cost was concerned, Lord Knollys subscribed wholeheartedly to the doctrine that air travel must not he only for the well-to-do. The greater the volume of travel by air, the cheaper it would become—thus generating more travel. He made the excellent point that the people in this country were not air-conscious in the same sense as Americans were. They were only " R.A.F.-conscious." Though British airlines were owned and capitalised by the State, they still had to be run primarily as sound com- mercial concerns. The public would be given what they needed in the way of frequency of services, and he considered that a daily frequency was the minimum on routes with any real traffic. A half-hour sen-ice through most of the day, on a route such as that between London and Paris, was not too much. Passengers did not always want to book; they wanted to arrive at an airport and catch the next service. The final public demand was for service, and the more individual was the service the better. Where the public found that it got good service, that line was used again. A smooth and efficient service had to be planned; it did not just happen. But Lord Knollys added : " You cannot-sell seats in the air on service alone; nor alone with the best aircraft, nor with the most complete ground organisation. All three are needed to make up the first-class airline. And this country is going to have all three." Among the speakers who took part in the debate which we are on the threshold of dramatic increases in speed. New York within 6 hrs; Johannesburg within I4hrs. people in this country are not air-conscious . . . only R.A.F.-conscious. on the very large aircraft there will be trans- verse sleeping bunks. Unloading the Liberator at Prestwick airport on the completion of B.O. A.C. 's2000th crossing of the North Atlantic. This flight took 13 hr. 38 min. for the 3,104 miles from Dorval in Canada followed, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Hazelton Nicholl, formerly E.A.F. Establishments Officer to B.O.A.C., stressed the point that confidence in air travel would increase with air- craft punctuality, and that the more points of call there were on routes, the better it was for "showing the flag." Mr. R. Kelso, chairman of the General Steam Navigation Co., as might have been expected, made a point of the need for good service to the individual on air lines, and for comfortable travel to and from airfields. Sir William Wood, president of the L.M.S. Railway, raised the interest- ing question whether, in aircraft, bunks were better placed longitudinally than transversely in order to minimise the possibility of air sickness. To this, Lord Knollys replied that a balanced load was the real problem—one with which the railways did not have to contend. He added that on very large aircraft there would be transverse bunks. There was some sharp criticism of certain aspects of B.O.A.C.'s detailed service from Mr. K. E. Shelley, K.C., and Mr. Vivian Davies. They asked, particularly^ that passengers should not be " kept in the dark " about delays and aircraft snags. On the other hand. Major R. H. Mayo, who is technical adviser to B.O.A.C., considered that the Corporation had achieved a great deal in the most difficult circumstances. He pleaded for '' tailor-made '' aircraft for indi- vidual routes, and recommended that opera- tors should specify the designs for their own aircraft and not leave them to such bodies as the Brabazon Committee. Brigadier-General Sir Osborne Mance asked for international agreement on competition between airlines so as to avoid subsidies. Lord Knollys agreed that subsidies were undesirable, but pointed out that there were some vital routes which, although they did not pay, would always have to be maintained. Sir Frederick Handley Page, president of the Institute, who was in the chair, said that he hoped attention was being directed towards the designing of aircraft to fly at 500 m.p.h. at 50,000ft., and remarked that faster aircraft meant shorter journeys, thus making possible the acceptance of greater austerity in passenger comfort, with consequent reduction in costs. He also considered that to use one type of air- craft for routes of varying length was not to make the most economical use of the machine. He also commented on the need for noise sup- pression in aircraft, but Lord Knollys neatly passed this one back to Sir Frederick on the score that it was the manufacturers' concern to ensure this in the first instance.
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