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Aviation History
1956
1956 - 1675.PDF
FIRST AERONAUTICAL WEEKLY IN THE WORLD FOUNDED 1909 and AIRCRAFT ENGINEER No 2497 Vol 70 FRIDAY 30 NOVEMBER 1956 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 Iliffe 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 1, Ontario Thomas Skinner and Co., Ltd. 67 Yonge Street Telephone • Empire 6-0873 New York 6, N.Y. 111 Broadway Telephone • Digby 9-1197 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Home and Overseas • Twelve Months, £4 10s. U.S.A. and Canada. $14.00 in this issue 840 C. of A. Flight Testing 841 Alouettell 843 Black Box Flying Controls 845 Airborne Proximity Indicator 848 Operation Deep-Freeze 850 Every Tail Tells a Story 854 Controlled Comfort 857 Australian Aeronautical De- velopment A Team of HuskiesW HAT a fine thing it is, in these perfidious days, to read of a venture like the polar operation Deep Freeze; for here are men, aeroplanes and dogs working as a finely trained team in the advance towards a worthy goal, and not savaf :r>p their own kind in the political jungle. The Globemasters are hauling no drab, grim battalions into battle; no tanks squat like toads in their freight-holds. Instead these great machines are laden with materials and supplies whereby men may live secure in the blizzard-scourged wastes at the bottom of the world. And teamed along with them are Skymasters, Skytrains, Otters and assorted helicopters. Even a little Auster is on its way south. The task is to establish and to maintain bases for one of the most hopeful international projects the world has seen—the International Geophysical Year. Heroics have no place in this undertaking: it has been conceived and planned, and is now being executed, in the most scientific manner possible. But of adventure and courage there is no lack, as this brief, unembellished paragraph from the account by our New Zealand correspondent will witness: "The landing might easily have had a disastrous sequel, for the temperature of some 58 deg below zero caused the R4D's wheel/ski landing gear to stick to the ice. It took 15 Jato bottles to get the aircraft off. The captain of a C-124 orbiting was considering a belly-landing in order to provide the crew with living quarters in its hull until help could be obtained." Clearly, the lessons of this great enterprise will not all be analysed in the laboratory. But not the least of them, we believe, will be a new realization of what aeroplanes can accomplish in the service of mankind. Stability and ControlI T has not been easy for pilots to relinquish the idea of a mechanical link between the control column and the control surface. But, with use, they have gradually gained confidence in power-operated controls. Such controls, of course, are now commonplace in high-speed aircraft, and to the system has been added "autostabilizing" to provide—in layman's language—artificial rather than aerodynamic stability over a limited part of the speed range. Failure of, say, an autostabilizer could be as catastrophic as failure of the flying controls. Where, therefore, should the limit of reliance on systems be set? If the autostabilizers cannot (as is usually the case) be switched-off by the pilot, why not extend their limited-speed function to cover the complete flight regime? Why not reduce the area—and so the weight and drag—of the fixed tail-surfaces by 10, 20 or 30 per cent and replace their function by autostabilizer servos? This is the concept of the unstable aircraft. There is a case for its acceptance— a case based upon improved performance obtained through the logical extension and integration of automatic control. This aspect of flying-control science (can it still be termed an art?) is discussed on pages 843 and 844. Just how far ahead of the production line the industry is thinking can be gauged by studying released information on prototype fighters, and then looking, if not on the control system manufacturers' shelves, at least at their display stands and test rigs. On these anvils of development, the last vestige of control-circuit linkage is being hammered away. It it being superseded by signalling systems better suited to the needs of semi-automatic flight control. The pilot's command is now transmitted—by an evolutionary process as logical as that which attended the railway signal—electrically through strands of wire: an innovation which provides substantial benefits in every respect of control-system engineering. The gulf between experiment and practice cannot be entirely explained away by the inevitable time-lag that must always occur while new systems are proved: rather it is because of the necessity for making such systems inherently reliable and certain to "fail safe"—and, having done so, to win the confidence of those who are to fly with them.
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