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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 0867.PDF
"V."™,*-,, ^ r %*•& CO ERCIAL AIRCRAFT Airliners of the World FLIGHT COMPILATION AIR commerce is above all a business of aeroplanes. This truism, we feel, isexcused by recent unwarranted and unhealthy preoccupation with airlinepersonalities and finances rather than with equipment; and it is one which the coming years will surely corroborate. In this realization our present review has been prepared. It aims at impartiality as between nations and companies, and it appears as a new era of transport opens. Rivalry and romance in that era will have no less a place, and enterprise no less a reward, than in the age of sail. In our reference to impartiality we had especially in mind the method and extent of treatment, and no significance should be attached to order of precedence. We had hoped to deal with the various aircraft in a descending order of weight, but purely mechanical considerations intervened. An earnest of our unbiased intention is the pride of place accorded on this page to the Bristol Britannia (the most advanced transport aircraft now in the hands of any operator), whereas the main review is introduced by America's pure-jet challengers, the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8. The Britannia and Comet, DC-8 and -7C, Boeing 707 and Lockheed L.1649— these are the machines that will serve the intercontinental routes in the years ahead, and in them are epitomized the skill and ingenuity of the world's foremost con- structors. Though of great bulk and weight (up to 135 tons), their aerodynamic cleanness and available power are such as to permit sustained cruising speeds ranging from the 350 m.p.h. of the DC-7C to the 600 m.p.h. of the pure-jet Douglas
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