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Aviation History
1950
1950 - 2217.PDF
002 FLIGHT, 21 December 1930 ENS IDE STORY By DIOGENES A Previously Unpublished Chapter in the History of an Airliner's Development : Providence Confounds the Slide-rule NOW that the aircraft concernedis happily in service and mostof the operational bugs have been laboriously chased out of it, the story can be told. There is no power- ful moral in the tale—unless it is that plain luck in this business of aircraft design is more usual than is generally inferred from the comments of people reading papers before the Royal Aero- nautical Society—but those whose No. 8 hats do not sit too tightly on their brows may find cause for a titter. They may even recognize one or two of their friends—but never, of course, themselves. You see, the design team just couldn't getthe fore-and-aft control of the thing into a state of comfortable compromise. When the stability characteristics over an acceptable e.g. range were good, the stick forces were so great and varied so much that Samsons were needed to fly and to land it; and when the tab-gearing and the trailing-edge contours were arranged to lighten the elevator, the aircraft was unstable at aft loadings. V "Samsons were needed to fly . . . it." Not that it was difficult, dangerous, or appreciably worse than dozens of other aircraft in service; it was merely that the Air Registration Board, with a toughness born of higher expecta- tions, were disinclined to certificate the aircraft for the e.g. range de- manded by the customers—who, being an airline, were themselves very naturally intent on squeezing the last drop of blood from the contractual pound of flesh. Stalemate had been reached and everyone in the firm was getting pretty bad-tempered. Not to put too fine a point on the matter, the aero- dynamicists, project office, flight ob- servers and pilots were hardly on speaking terms. For weeks all com- munication between the different departments had been by means of tersely composed memoranda. Meanwhile, had he not been a chess-playing teetotaller with a sub- sidiary passion for bee-keeping, the production manager would have-taken to drink. Rows of perfectly good air- craft stood in the shops with their empennages in various states of dis- habille and men were on waiting time for reasons which they understood only in the vaguest terms. To them it appeared idiotic to have production lines waiting while the prototype seemed to fly with remarkable re- liability day after day and for no very obvious purpose; not even the shop stewards, flushed with victory from a joint production-committee meeting, could tell them clearly why everything had thus stopped dead. The ordinary management had long since been de- feated by the hieroglyphics of the wranglers and the matter had entered a realm in which even the technical director sometimes found himself floundering. Not the most free trans- lation by the public relations depart- ment for the works notice-boards could have made much sense of the odd "stick-free stabilities," "B 2s," "Desyn readings" and "hinge1 moments" which filled the coldly tempestuous memoranda. There was no reason why the im- passe (if a daily changing succession of modifications, engineered by the person whose theories happened at the moment to be popular, can be described as an " impasse ") should not have continued for ever. Or, at least, until the Ministry of Supply, goaded by the impatient airline operator, should enter the ring and, with the help of boffins from their own depart- ments, Boscombe Down, or Farn- borough, should hammer out an un- comfortable decision. Indeed, the pressure might first have come from the politicians, for these unfortunates are ever at the mercy of knowledgeable questioners on the Opposition benches and are curiously sensitive to criticisms in the Press. And the Press was quietly feel- ing its way towards an almighty uncovering of inefficiency in aero- nautically high places, using this un- fortunate aircraft as a scapegoat. Bad news being good news from the circu- lation point of view, there had, in fact, already been some not-so-veiled references to "delays in the produc- tion of one of our leading airliners," and one of the more vigorously critical air correspondents had strung together > lot of unrelated misfortunes in order to prove that the British aircraft in- dustry was in control of a set of moronic fellow-travellers. Nevertheless—it might be added parenthetically—none of the technicians responsible for the impasse appeared to have noticed the rising wind or to feel in any way exposed. They continued to work quietly away in their warm little worlds of theory and were conscious neither of contracual dates nor of the passage of time. Only the upper crust ". . . and men were on waiting time ..." of the management feared the icy fury ofthe gale, and only the business manager ticked off the days as time moved on to-wards the promised delivery date. As it happened, it was the chief de-signer who finally took matters into his own hands. For some time his staffhad noticed a gradual change in his manner. Clever and experienced, butmild and almost diffident in his dealings with the rest of the design team, he hadtaken unexpectedly to the habit of mak- ing snap decisions. At first over little,unimportant matters, then over graver issues. In the senior staff mess thestory went round that he had been reading No Highway and, identifyinghimself unhappily with the central character (who, you will remember, isa pleasant, but over-boffinized scien- tist), had decided to base his externalbehajaour rather on that of the humanely Napoleonic chief designer inthat book. Be that as it may, the change wasreal enough, whatever the inner effort involved in maintaining a facade whichwas not at all in keeping with a natural character developed over forty-oddyears. He strode vigorously through the drawing-office—whereas he hadpreviously shown a healthy respect for the domain of the chief draughtsman.He argued verbally with the chief aerodynamicist—whereas he had pre-viously dealt only in memoranda and had avoided him when contrary deci-sions were to be made. He even told
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