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Aviation History
1947
1947 - 0065.PDF
JANUARY ~i 6TH, 1947 FLIGHT 57 American Newsletter Too Much Emphasis on Performance of Commercial \S Aircraft : "New Jet'propelled Fighters and Bombers By KIBITZER" THE more one hears and reads about developmentsin sonic, high-speed and high-altitude research andtheir application to commercial air transport, the more it seems that, in the excitement over the use of new words, many people are forgetting the meaning of the old ones. Surely it is time that we revived a few of the original concepts adopted by the early operators as fundamental, ,and put them up where they belong and where everyone can see them. These were such simple words as " reli- ability," "comfort," "punctuality" and "" safety," and the place for them now is over everybody's desk, and on every office wall. To-day one has only to read any aviation magazine, or even some sections of the non-technical Press, to realize that certain aircraft characteristics—desirable enough in their place—are becoming over-important. Among these are speed, size and operational ceiling, and unless a new type shows an improvement in these respects, it is apt to be looked on as retrogressive. Admittedly we can now make machines that will go faster, higher, and carry a bigger payload than ever before, but this ability is of very doubtful value to the passengers if other mechanical aids on which the safe operation of these very machines depend do not keep pace with development. And, judging by events, they haven't. Anybody who is doubtful of this statement should listen- in on the radio at a major airport when the weather is bad; or consider the airline crashes over the last year; or count up the cases of fire ; or the cabin-pressurization and de-icing failures that have occurred. Nowadays it could almost be argued that with every additional ten miles an hour of speed, or thousand feet of operational altitude, or thousand pounds of payload, we also add another element of danger, or cause of passenger discom- fort. Due to the present rate of unbalanced development, we have reached a situation where flying can be more dan- gerous and unreliable than ever before. Yet we are still aiming for speeds at which passengers will no longer be able to stand the rough-housing they will get under turbu- lent conditions, and for altitudes at which they will have to travel with oxygen masks on their faces because pres- surization isn't good enough, and for aircraft perform- ance that will require such high strength factors that structure weights will be out of proportion to payload, and for schedules we can never keep because bad weather aids are not good enough! Let us call a halt and have a look to see where we are going, and perhaps consolidate our wartime gains in development. If we want people to fly we must concen- trate once move on safe, economical, punctual and com- fortable transportation. Until we do that the public will not support air transport. If we need an example of this, we have the present decline in North Atlantic business. This is not a mere seasonal slump. The fact is that the Queen Elizabeth and the America are taking passengers away, just because they run on time and are comfortable. During the war people accepted the danger of a forced landing and the unpunctuality and discomfort of air trans- port in preference to the idea of being torpedoed, but they need not and will not do so now. All this is not a criticism of anybody or of any aircraft or any airline—it is a criticism of a way of thinking. Read the daily papers and their descriptions of trans-sonic and supersonic experiments. They talk of shock-waves and stock stalls, sonic barriers and speeds of 1,700 miles an hour, and all mixed up with it are suggestions that in a year or two we shall all be flying above the speed of sound in arrow-shaped aircraft with rocket propulsion. But the public doesn't want to fly like that, particularly when in the next paragraph it reads of astrodomes coming off, aircraft coming to pieces in the air, de-icing failures, transports flying into hills and people in bed having machines nosing inquisitively into their bedroom windows. We don't even try to help John Citizen visualize the "Sonic Barrier" in his own mind. All we do is to con- fuse and frighten him so that he probably thinks of it as a sort of wall of ectopiasmic matter, which suddenly arrives in front of the windscreen and through which one must dive with a sickening crash like a trick cyclist at a circus. Until all this is explained in its proper perspec- tive, this sonic talk is doing great harm to civil aviation. While everybody realizes that, militarily, we have to pierce —and control our aircraft through—the sonic range or perish if there is another war, commercially it is quite un- necessary to ram it down the throat of an already fright- ened public. It will be many years before really economic aircraft operation gets out of the 300 to 400 mile an hour class, and although at some time in the future supersonic com- mercial aircraft will be used, do let us try to make those we have now do what they are supposed to do. In the end, it is the public's endorsement of a safe and reasonable method of travel that will keep air transport flying ; in their desire for larger and faster machines many opera- tors seem to forget that the colour of their balance-sheet is, in the end, dependent on the public's requirements, and not on the scientists' dreams. The writer would like to see I.A.T.A. suggest to all its members that they start a co-ordinated advertising drive to educate the public into believing that air trans- port is a normal, everyday, unexciting, but useful, method of travel and not something out of a Buck Rogers strip cartoon. But a programme of public education must be supported by trouble free operation with economical—not spectacular—aircraft. Until it is, air transport will remain a hit-and-miss affair. # * * TF people are doubtful about the reactions of the U.S. -*- public to news of supersonic developments, they should read some of the publicity that the successful first power- driven flight of the Bell XS-I received. Despite the fact that speeds were very wisely limited to 550 m.p.h., all the daily Press carried the story, with varying degrees of ex- citement and size of headline. There is no doubt that the average man in the street was intensely interested, and he is now looking forward to the day—believed by him to be not far distant—when America becomes the first country to produce a piloted aircraft which will, in controlled flight, exceed the speed of sound. As readers of these letters will have already realized, the writer takes a much less sanguine view of the whole affair and believes that, except perhaps for some isolated freak flight which may well end in disaster, that day is some way off. Even if a skilful designer and a brave pilot do manage to get a machine to accelerate through the compressibility range, there is still the question of slowing it down again. The acceleration period can, we know, be tremendously rapid—but can the deceleration period be equally so? Obviously it is impracticable to use any form of dive brake at such speeds, and the only way to decelerate seems to be by a retarding rocket or perhaps by climbing. But to climb might, in certain temperatures and speed conditions, increase the Mach number, quite apart from the additional difficulties that would be encountered in regard
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