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Aviation History
1950
1950 - 1055.PDF
FLIGHT, i June 1950 673 Sir Richard Fairey, M.B.E., Hon. R.Ae.S. AVIATION and what it costs 3 .••-.••-.• Sir Richard Fairey's Wilbur Wright Lecture to the R.Ae.S. : What the World Has Spent on. Aeronautics Since the Wright Brothers First Flew : Part I : Civil Expenditure ADMISSIBLE in every way to that select category oflecture which—like Mr. Peter Masefield's classic Com-L monwealth Lecture of 1948—serves for long after- wards as a standard work on its subject, Sir Richard Fairey's Some Aspects of Expenditure on Aviation was delivered before the Royal Aeronautical Society last Thursday, May 25th, constituting the 38th Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture. Appreciation of Sir Richard's masterly treatment of his theme can be equalled only by admiration of his courage in tackling such a vast and imponderable subject (the almost apologetic title of his paper, in the best scientific tradition, gives no hint as to its panoramic scope). Having invoked the aid of numerous authorities, printed, written and verbal—his list of acknowledgments is one of the longest we have seen—he condensed what must have been a formidable mass of raw material into a paper of only average length ; had it illustrated with 17 admirably drawn graphs; and achieved a result that any author of treatises might profitably take as a model. His introductory passages may be summarized, Trery briefly, by saying that he began by pointing out that any assessment of what the world has spent on aviation since heavier-than-air craft first flew ought to involve the use of a' reliable yard- stick, which, however, was manifestly non-existent. Never- theless, with some standards we could at least make a relative measure of achievement, provided we appreciated their short- comings. The man-hour standard was tempting, but one found that it varied enormously from country to country, and was impossible to use outside the sphere of manual labour. Probably the least unsatisfactory measure was that of cur- rency, and the obvious selection was the dollar, which had sugered the least change—even so, allowance had to be made for the fact that, in considering its value in purchasing power of manual labour, the original length of this yardstick had shrunk by some 66 per cent in the past 50 years. (Sir Richard illustrated dollar and wage-rate fluctuations by means of graphs, not reproduced here.) It would avail little, explained the lecturer, to use an average dollar over the whole period as the standard, particu- larly in converting to dollar values the other currencies con- cerned. Moreover, the volume of work done was by far the greatest at the period when the dollar was declining towards its lowest and when wages were rising in the same order to offset the change. Accordingly, for the purposes of his paper he had decided to convert currencies to the dollar rate per- taining to any particular year under examination. Owing to the absence of complete figures after 1948, he had been forced to terminate his survey there—or, rather, at the end of the financial year 1948-49, which was March, 1949, for the United Kingdom and June, 1949, for the United States. After dealing at some length with the difficulties of dis- entangling civil and military aviation expenditure, and of the complications introduced by Government subsidies, Sir Richard turned to the question of aircraft costs from the earliest days to the present time. Many of the pioneers worked with their own hands, even when, as the Wright brothers did, they employed other help. I believe [continued the lecturer] that Mr. Taylor, their mechanic, was paid $15 a week. The cost of the very early aircraft was mostly that of materials and of the engine, if itwe fe purchased separately. The original Wright Flyer, which weighed only 605 lb empty, is said by Orville Wright himself to have cost between $1,000 and $2,000, and the same applies to the first batch of six built in 1907. Sir Francis McClean still has the receipt from Orville Wright for Flyer No. 3, at £1,000, then equivalent "to $4,865. It is when aircraft were first built for sale that we can get a closer measure of cash value. For example, the Farman biplane was advertised for sale in 1908 at $5,840. The Voisin exhibited at the Olympia Show in 1909 was priced at $4,620 but guaranteed to fly for three miles, and Lord Brabazon's original Bird of Passage, another Voisin, flown by him in 1909, cost him $4,860, plus $3,400 for the engine, as compared with Mr. Glenn Martin's aircraft of the same year at a price of $4,200. A little later the Handley Page Company were quoting $1,825 f°r a single-seater, and M. Santos Dumont $1,700 for a Demoiselle. In fact, it seems from a search of the records for the years from 1909 to 1914 that the price fell generally within the range of $1,500 to $10,000, including an order for six Short seaplanes purchased by the Admiralty at a price of $9,750 apiece, less engine, and it is interesting to note that the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company (now the Bristol Aeroplane Company), founded in 1910, built in that period 77 " Box- krtes," which were sold at $4,840 and $5,700 apiece, and a number of other types, none of them costing more than $6,000 each, including the engine. Since those days we have seen aircraft grow rapidly in size, speed and standards of passenger comfort to such modern examples as the Boeing Stratocruiser at the empty weight of 83,500 lb for $1,500,000, and a cruising speed of up to 340 m.p.h.; the DC-6 at 53,500 Ifo for $750,000 and 310 m.p.h. ; or the jet-engined Comet at 46,830 lb for approximately $1,200,000 and 490 m.p.h.; and still we have small two- seaters, such as the Piper Cub, for $2,795—that is, in the same order of price as the earliest types. Examination of price in terms of cost per Ib tare weight has little meaning in the light of other variables, but does dis- close the interesting point that the average has risen through- out only in the ratio of three to one, or by the same degree as the dollar yardstick has shrunk. The earliest aircraft were from 5 to 10 dollars a lb and remained in that region until about 1934, when the change of method of construction of 26 CO22 SIB </> CC 14 < do Fig. I. Prices of aircraft'per pound weight (empty) • BRITISH x AMERICAN BOEING 377 x \ SHORT EMPIRE BOAT- BRISTOL • BOX KITE «*O BRISTOL FIGHTER P #DH4 .0H.34 SCIPIO BOAT FORDx BOEING 4O. B-KDDCS DOVE AT(2-SO-JCI MOTH BOEING 247 X #DH B915 •• ^BOBN \ HART VKGINtA .MAATM B-26 I9IO 1915 I92O 1925 I93O 1935 I94O 1945 I9SO
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