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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 0791.PDF
FIRST AERONAUTICAL WEEKLY IN THE WORLD FOUNDED 1909 and AIRCRAFT ENGINEER No 2474 Vol 69 FRIDAY 22 JUNE 19.16 Editor MAURICE A. SMITH D.F.C. and BAR Associate Editor H. F. KING M.B.E. Technical Editor W. T. GUNSTON Production Editor ROY CASEY Hiffe and Sons Ltd Dorset House Stamford Street London, S.E.I Telephone • Waterloo 3333 (60 lines) BRANCH OFFICES Coventry 8-10 Corporation Street Telephone • Coventry 5210 Birmingham 2 King Edward House, New Street Telephone • Midland 7191 (7 lines) Manchester 3 260 Deansgate Telephone • Blackfriars 4412 (3 lines) Deansgate 3595 (2 lines) Glasgow C.2 26B Renfield Street Telephone • Central 1265 (2 lines) Toronto 2, Ontario 74 College Street Telephone • Walnut 4-5631 New York 6, N.Y. Ill Broadway Telephone • Digby 9-1197 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Home and Overseas • Twelve Months, £4 10s. U.S.A. and Canada. $14.00 in this issue 796 Officer Material 799 Flying the 707 803 Spritely Valiants 805 Smoothly Turbulent 808 "Flap-Blown" D.H. Sea Venom 809 Cranfield Shows its Work 810 Full Cry 812 A.S.T.'s Quarter Century Q Ideas and Applications UITE the thing nowadays is a new sedative. Made up to the prescription "The Americans may be ahead; but we have the ideas," and swallowed after excesses of national pride and confidence, it can induce warm, rosy dreams of a golden age, when all the brightest ideas were British (until the base, commercially minded Americans seized upon them and turned them to immediate and profitable account). Soothing, too, is the feeling it imparts that everything is going to turn out well because we have the brains, whereas the Americans (as everyone knows) have only hordes of workers and masses of machines. How unfortunate that, like most bromides, the new formula should prove depressing in reaction and flat in after-taste. Malaise returns, and with it the awful realization that chronic self-deception may be at the seat of the trouble. A clinical examination is, in any case, indicated. The case history immediately shows that our national productivity of ideas, though never really unhealthy, has never been phenomenally high. The best inventions and innovations—jet propulsion not excepted—have generally developed in the natural order of things, as they have elsewhere, though occasion- ally they have had to be grafted on. (Under examination, let it be clear, are ideas per se and not their realization or exploitation.) So the popular superstition that we in this country have been vouchsafed an exclusive, inexhaustible, source of inventive thought can be dismissed together with the cold-key-down-the-back; and should any symptoms of anaemia be observed under the microscope, these are clearly not due to the depredations of parasitic bodies. Surprisingly, perhaps, the idea-stream is seen to be healthier at this present time than for years past, and the explanation of this is both interesting in itself and hopeful for the well-being of the industry as a corporate body. Apparent to the least practised eye is the strong condition of our turbojet and turboprop powerplants. Here, indeed, are practical ideas realized in terms of power, economy, compactness and lightness. But the intrinsic worth of the most remarkable engine is little more than that of an interesting specimen of metal- work : without imaginative application it may wither and die—or, equally likely, may suffer amputation by Ministerial order. Today it may reasonably be asked if our powerplants are being applied either imaginatively or expeditiously enough, having regard to the ambitious schemes propounded in recent times. Of these we recall especially the Rolls-Royce jet- lift formula, whereby Mach-2-plus airliners or bombers (or, for that matter, other classes of aircraft) may take off or land both vertically and slowly; the principle of the jet flap, disclosed at the last S.B.A.C. Display and widely acclaimed by our visitors; and the Handley Page system of boundary-layer control, now put forward as a practical economical proposition for subsonic jet transports of a class typified in these pages last week. Nor is it to such "paper" ideas that the industry may need to turn if it is to prosper in the years ahead. The time already seems overdue for our light, simple, powerful turboprops to be applied to short-take-off (or even vertical take-off) machines, just as the less efficient units of America and France are being applied to indigenous developments. We need only consider the Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer as a prototype (in the true sense of the word) to visualize what might be accomplished with a whole range of transports for civil and military short-field applications, utilizing progressively more efficient powerplants and high-lift devices in many and various combinations. Certainly at this present time we do have ideas—but through sheer imagination and effort, and not through any heaven-sent right; and if we do not put them to work in due time they will be taken from us and applied to our eventual shame and detriment. Something, perhaps, is in need of a shaking up. And it is not the opiate to which we earlier alluded.
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