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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 0123.PDF
27 January 1956 123 Power in plenty: a stirring study of the Comet 3 as it snapped smartly away from the Hatfield runway on a recent test flight. CIVIL AVIATION BULGING ORDER BOOK I AT the end of the Old Year the Lockheed Aircraft Corpora-*** tion's order book accounted for military and civil aircraft and spares valued at £429m. About one-third of this, £120m,is for Super Constellations, of the 1049 and 1649 series, and Electras—a sum which, a Lockheed press release observes, repre-sents nearly double the annual civil and military export volume of the British aircraft industry. In all, seventeen airlines have pur-chased 177 of these aircraft. The best-selling airliner, despite the continued strong demand for Super Constellations, was theElectra, which has accounted for £66m worth of contracts (total to date is 104 aircraft) since it was announced last June. BULGING ORDER BOOK II TOURING 1955 the Douglas Aircraft Co. received orders forJ-'328 commercial transport aircraft—capable, the company claims, of providing as much capacity as all the airliners in servicesix years ago. Valued, with spares, at $l,125m (£400m), the 1955 orders raised the backlog for Douglas airliners to a total of388 aircraft worth $l,267m (£442m). The 98 DC-8s ordered last year represented a total value of $596m (£212m)—nearly halfthis amount. Piston-engined aircraft of the DC-6/7 series accounted for the remainder, the exact break-down of types yetto be delivered at the end of the year being as follows: 18 DC-6As; 86 DC-6Bs; 82 DC-7s and '7Bs; and 104 DC-7Cs. LUFTHANSA TO SOUTH AMERICA AN agreement concluded between Lufthansa and the Brazilian^ airline VARIG, it is reported by West German radio, anticipates the opening on August 15th of a regular serviceto Latin America, and the renewal of old-established German airline operations to the South American continent. It is likelythat the North American and South American terminals of Lufthansa's transatlantic services will be linked by VARIG, anddetails of the co-operative service were being discussed in Cologne by VARIG's president, Snr. Ruben M. Berta, on January 19th. B.E.A.'s RECORD YEARB RITISH EUROPEAN AIRWAYS handled 23 per cent moretraffic during 1955 and produced a total revenue of more than £20m. The majority of the 2.15 million passengers carried inthis period flew in B.E.A.'s 26 Viscounts and 20 Elizabethans, which were worked at an average utilization of about 2,200 hrper aircraft. There was an increase in freight during the year of more than one-fifth; nearly 7m ton-miles were produced. Commenting on the results, B.E.A.'s chairman, Lord Douglasof Kirtleside, said that capacity increased by about 24 per cent, against an average increase in staff numbers of only three per cent,giving an increase in productivity of more than 20 per cent measured in capacity ton-miles produced by each member of thestaff—"a fine effort by all." The cost of the capacity ton-mile was reduced by about 10 per cent in a year of rising wages and materialcosts. Lord Douglas added, however, that the capacity ton-mile couldnot be used as a basis for comparison of the relative efficiency of different airlines; indeed, there was no simple index that could beused for such a comparison. "I am frequently surprised," said Lord Douglas, "that this simple truth is not understood by somany public commentators on airline affairs." Profit for the first seven months of the current financial year,April to October, was nearly £2im, although a loss occurred during November, the month of the French air traffic controlstrike. The one millionth Viscount passenger was carried in January 1955. TWIN PIONEER PROPOSITION CCOTTISH AIRLINES, the operating subsidiary of Scottish^ Aviation, are understood to have submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation to employ openground at Wormwood Scrubs (eight miles from the centre of London) as an airfield for the Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer. This move is of interest in view of the arguments put forward for the use of the short take-off Twin Pioneer for city-centre
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