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Aviation History
1953
1953 - 0471.PDF
FLIGHT, 10 April 1953 467 CIVIL AVIATION NEW BRITISH SERVICES O N May 14th, B.E.A. will open their first service to the Mediterranean island of Majorca, in the Balearics. Two weekly Viking services will be flown—outwards on Thursdays and Sundays, returning on Fridays and Mondays—and the fares will be £21 17s iod single and £39 8s 8d return. Leaving Northolt at 1140 hr, the aircraft will reach Palma by 1750 hr after a refuelling stop at Bordeaux. May 15th is announced as the starting date of two more ferry services by Silver City Airways—from Gatwick to Le Touquet and from Southampton to the Isle of Wight. The new long-nose "Superfreighters" will be used on the London-Le Touquet route, operating twice daily. The journey will take 40 minutes and up to 20 passengers will be carried in the larger aircraft, at fares of £4 single and £7 4s return. Vehicle fares will be identical with those on the existing Southampton-Cherbourg and Lympne- Ostend ferries—e.g., £10 10s for a small car. There will be up to 24 services daily on the 21-mile route between Eastleigh and Bembridge, Isle of Wight, described by S.C.A. as the shortest air-ferry service in the world. With both vehicles and passengers, this journey will take nine minutes. LUFTHANSA'S DILEMMA S PEAKING in West Germany recently, Mr. R. T. Hurley, president of the Curtiss-Wright Corporation, predicted that the Super Constellation and DC-7 "would beat the Viscount and Comet in the race for the German market." The full text of the speech is not available, but the prediction was reportedly based on the argument that the new Lufthansa would have to use the best aircraft available. In discussing the comparative economics of modern transport aircraft, Mr. Hurley used the customary argument that jet airliners will not be used widely for another seven to ten years "because they are still uneconomic." Despite American statements of this kind (there have been several in recent months), and the Continental report that P.A.W.A. will supply Convairs for the medium-range services in exchange for a number of hotels in West Germany, there are good grounds for belief that the planners of the revived Lufthansa have not yet made their final choice. By the time Lufthansa is ready to participate on a large scale in world airline operations, increased use of the latest British airliners will have sharpened the already keen competition in Europe today. It seems doubtful whether Lufthansa's prospects would be improved by the operation of comparatively obsolescent aircraft. AMERICAN INDUSTRY PRAISED A SPEECH delivered by Dr. Walter Berchtold, president of Swissair, to the Congress of Civil Aviation Conferences, held at Kansas recently, paid warm tribute not only to the quality of American airline equipment, but to manufacturers' post-sales service and the co-operative spirit of U.S. authorities and airlines. When the Korean war broke out, said Dr. Berchtold, Swissair were faced with the fateful question as to whether it would be possible for the airline to rely on continued supply of spares for their American-built fleet and undelayed delivery of DC-6Bs for the Atlantic services. But although Switzerland was neither a big customer of the American aircraft industry nor a member of the Atlantic Pact Organization, "we found that the American attitude towards us was perfectly fair, undiscriminating and co-operative, and this gave us the assurance that we could continue to base our activity on American equipment . . ." THE C.P.A. COMET ACCIDENT PAKISTAN civil-aviation authorities issued on March 31st a summary of their report on the accident which befell C.P.A. Comet CF-CUN at Karachi on March 3rd. The aircraft, which was making a delivery flight to Sydney to inaugurate the first jet service between Sydney and Honolulu, crashed during take-off with the loss of all the eleven men on board. The attempted take-off was made at night on a runway 7,500ft in length with a 650ft stopway of hard sand, terminating in a barbed-wire perimeter fence supported by low concrete posts. Both weather and visibility at the time are described in the report as satisfactory. Noting that the pilot, Capt. C. H. Pentland, had only limited experience in Comet flying, the report says : "He elected to take-off at night with the maximum permissible take-off weight for the prevailing conditions. These circumstances required a strict adherence to the prescribed take-off technique, which was not followed." Reliable eye-witnesses (including a B.O.A.C. flight crew and Karachi approach and airfield controllers) confirmed that take-off run of the aircraft was abnormal in that the nose was TIMELY HATCH: The first of five Bristol Mk 32 superfreighters on its delivery flight in the hands of Captains R. A. Madelaine and D. A. Flett. It went into Silver City service at Easter. maintained for practically all the run in an unusually high attitude; tail bumper and tyre marks gave further evidence that the aircraft never actually became airborne. Apparently corrective action was taken at the end of the runway, and the Comet was just beginning to become airborne when the starboard undercarriage hit a culvert just outside the perimeter fence. "Technical examination," states the report, "did not indicate any failure or malfunctioning of airframe, engines or any vital system." There was no evidence that the pilot had tried to abandon the take-off at any stage. Excessive nose-high attitude was also found to be the cause of the accident to B.O.A.C. Comet G-ALYZ at Ciampiano Airport last October; on that occasion, however, prompt corrective action was taken and there were no casualties. SABENA'S FINANCIAL RESULTS EVERY employee of Sabena, the Belgian airline, received an extra month's pay in 1952, following the company's successful operating results for the year. After payment of tax, the airline profit for the year, during which 277,000 passengers were carried, totalled £338,500, compared with nearly £362,000 in 1951. M. Deswarte, Sabena's general manager, has announced the company's decision to buy three Sikorsky S.55 helicopters for delivery at the end of this summer. Following two and a half years' experience of regular mail services with Bell 47s, the airline plans to be the first to introduce scheduled international helicopter services—employing the new seven-seat Sikorskys. The new city terminal which is now being built for Sabena at Brussels will be topped by a flat concrete roof for possible use as a rotorstation. PROFIT FOR P.A.L. T HE net profit made by Philippine Air Lines in 1952 was £155,000 compared with £403,000 in 1951 (a record figure). A slight increase in revenue, explains the company's annual report, was offset by an increase of over 30 per cent in fuel costs and adverse economic conditions affecting domestic traffic. SERIES 2 HERON PERFORMANCE IN spite of fog and other varieties of weather that interfere with test-flying programmes, de Havillands have been going steadily ahead with the prototype Series 2—retractable undercarriage— Heron. The full study of test-flying data has not yet been completed, but a preliminary assessment shows that, in comparison with the Series I Heron, the fitting of retractable landing-gear raises the recommended cruising speed at 8,000ft (2,440 m) from 165 m.p.h. (266 km/hr) to about 185 m.p.h. (298 km/hr), at the expense of an increase of 165 lb (75 kg) in tare weight. At 5,000ft (1,525 m) the recommended cruising speed of the Series 2 is approximately 190 m.p.h. (305 km/hr). The Series 2 will, of course, show to best advantage on the longer stages, where the saving in fuel brought about by the lower drag will more than balance the extra weight of the retractable undercarriage. Hence, say de Havillands, over a stage-length of 500 miles, (805 km), under I.F.R. conditions, the Series 2 will carry the same payload as the Series 1 with a saving of nearly 20 min in stage time, and the direct operating cost will be reduced from 32.8 pence to about 30.0 pence per ton-mile of payload. On a longer stage-length of, say, 700 miles (1,125 k™)> the payload will be increased by 50 lb (23 kg), and the time reduced by 25 min. With the long-range fuselage tank, stage-lengths will be increased by about 145 miles (235 km), to totals of 1,145 miles (1,845 ta)> under I.F.R. conditions, and 1,390 miles (2,235 km), V.F.R. Plans for building the Series 2 Heron in quantity are well advanced and the new production fine will run parallel with that of the now well-established Series 1. First deliveries of the Series 2 are expected at the beginning of 1954.
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