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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 0074.PDF
74 FLIGHT THE PRODUCTION CONFERENCE Some Notable Papers and Discussions at Southampton THE Institution of Production Engineers' conference onProblems of Aircraft Production has, in only five years,established itself as one of the best-organized events of the aeronautical year. Officially it is the prerogative of the SouthernSection of the I.P.E., but in fact it is representative of the activities of the aircraft industry (and its ancillary suppliers) as a whole;and as such it provides a significant cross-section of the produc- tion aspect of current activities. The scene of this year's conference, on January 8 and 9, was,as always, the University of Southampton—a venue due to the moving spirit of Professor E. J. Richards, that most energetichead of die Aeronautical Engineering Faculty there. True to tradition, the secretary of the I.P.E., Mr. W. F. S. Woodford,and Miss M. S. C. Bremner, the editor of its Journal, had printed copies of each paper, together with a programme and a mostuseful personal identification tab, ready and waiting for each delegate. The proceedings opened at an official lunch attended by theMinister of Supply, the Rt. Hon. Reginald Maudling, M.P., and the Mayor of Southampton, Mrs. K. E. Cawte, J.P. The chair-man of the Southern Section of the I.P.E., Mr. D. L. Wiggins, welcomed the guests, headed by Dipt. Ing. Karl Frydag, theauthor of the Lord Sempill Paper. The Lord Sempill Paper Introducing DIPL. ING. KARL FRYDAG, LORD SEMPILL saidhe had known him since, in the 1920s, he had been concerned with the Rohrbach Romar. Thereafter he had worked withMesserschmitt and Focke-Wulf before joining the Henschel Flugzeugwerke—the greatest German "shadow factory" of thewar—with whom he stayed until Germany's collapse in 1945. Now he was a director of the parent company Henschel und Sohnof Kassel, which employed ten thousand. Dipl. Ing. Frydag opened his paper Concentration of AircraftDevelopment by saying that in 1928 the 20-ton Romar all-metal flying-boat was designed in five months by some eighty engi-neers and that in another five it was flying. Last year Sir Roy Fedden had told the conference that an American firm estimatedthat "an astronomical number of engineers" would require five years to evolve an Atlantic airliner at a cost of nearly thirteenmillion pounds. Only engineers of the very first class could do this work and they were in extremely short supply. Therefore, itwas essential for every country to realize it was faced with three main requirements: (a) comprehensive long-term planning basedon a complete, careful analysis of all contemplated development; (b) concentration upon a limited number of projects; (c) strictadherence to the selected projects and their developments to the utmost of their possibilities." The parallel often drawn between a European country and theU.S.A. was unfair because the latter was a continent with far vaster means and manpower, and no single country could keep pace.However, the country which concentrated could compete and lead the world—as Britain did with the Viscount and Comet.It was basically wrong to say: "Buy your aircraft in the U.S.A. and save the excessive expense of research and development," forthis ignored European achievements—which had been outstand- ing in many fields. Out of aeronautical research came benefitsfor a country's whole industry. The need was to co-operate as well as to specialize, so as to conserve the technical effort. "Western Europe," continued the lecturer, "is producing eachyear approximately 12,000 engineering graduates. Great Britain alone is producing 2,800 a year. The U.S.A. produced in 195050,000 engineering graduates which (astonishingly) decreased to 22,000 in 1955. Russia, however, produces at the present time,60,000 engineering graduates every year. These figures convey a grave warning to us. ... In the above figures I have not includedChina; but this country as well will have available, in some decades, a great number of engineering graduates." Dipl. Ing. Frydag went on to say that the "neutral visitor" tothe S.B.A.C. Display was astounded to see the numerous fields covered by the British aircraft industry and he considered that nocountry of this size could successfully complete so many projects, adding: "One should not forget that the development of proto-types alone will not do, and successful production swallows colossal sums in capital." It was no good to finish an aircraft"some day," it must be ready at the planned date—before it was obsolete. He considered that, had Germany after 1933 had asvaried a programme as Britain today, she would never have achieved substantial production. The German programme "had been planned ahead in full detail by a small number of very qualified engineers and bymembers of the Luftfahrtministerium and comprised develop- ment of only: two fighters; one night fighter; two bombers; andthree engines, 35- and 48-litre liquid-cooled and one air-cooled.' This programme was supported by meticulous planning, fromresearch to material supply, and including the establishment of one standard drawing system. Design was concentrated inseven airframe and three engine companies, backed by a number of private-enterprise mass-production firms—financed througha special State bank. These works were all built to a precise output in the overall scheme; e.g. the Henschel factory (whichDipl. Ing. Frydag managed from the time it was a grass plot until it was taken by the Russians in 1945) was to build 100 twin-engined bombers a month. Tooling, particularly in the pro- visioning of presses, was very complete, with many automaticmachines. Every factory achieved its planned output while its production plan remained unaltered, i.e. until the end of 1941 andthe beginning of 1942. "Then came the tragedy," for when the Luftwaffe lost its airsuperiority and the R.AlF. penetrated into Germany, the military became nervous and interfered with production, occasioningconstant switches of almost the whole programme; at first the Me and then the Fw fighter was considered the better. Dipl. Ing.Frydag particularly instanced the disorganization caused by can- cellation of the Me210 (410), because of development snags, afterproduction was actually under way in five countries. Henschel had spent 1,000,000 man-hours on tooling for a 100-a-monthoutput by unskilled labour. At this point Dipl. Ing. Frydag showed a film that revealedthe astounding degree of mechanization achieved. The item was a centre-section spar of conventional I-section, composed ofweb plate and booms built up from angle extrusions and cap plates, the spar having considerable dihedral. The fixture was aform of bench into which the plates and angles were assembled by girls and which were hydraulically clamped by remote control.End fittings were put in place, held apart by bracing plates between upper and lower booms and then drilled, in one opera-tion, by multiple drill-heads. Other fitting locations were similarly drilled by multiple heads as a single operation—fol-lowed, where appropriate, by multiple reaming. The top number of drills in one multiple head was 140. The boom-assembly drilling, countersinking and riveting weredone by automatic travelling machines—this in both planes in successive passes. The only manual operation was the hurriedinsertion of the rivets in front of the moving heads by a girl (there was said to be an infra-red safety device). The pitch ofthe rivets was set by a castellated guide-plate under the fixture and was not incorporated in the machine itself. Drill guide-plates were used only for the multiple reaming operations. The speaker considered that an error was made in trying tobuild the Me262 without first cancelling one of the other fighters. By the beginning of 1944 production was barely 2,000 aeroplanesa month, but in March the programme was rigorously pruned, with the result that by September it had risen to 4,800—the bestproof that type-limitation was the key to productivity. Pointing his moral from history, Dipl. Ing. Frydag maintainedthat the same lesson was true today. An aircraft industry should be jointly controlled by government and industry. Technicalprogress was so rapid that a governing board must be of the highest quality to select the right types and to distribute the workcorrectly. "All of us," he continued, "will have to defend Europe and Ido not think that the current development in Great Britain will meet the requirements of NATO. The ten post-war years show inGreat Britain developments covering fully almost any field you can think of, and this country is wasting its resources because ofthe diversity of its projects." Dipl. Ing. Frydag added that, like Sir Roy Fedden, he believedin concentration of the industry into a few large units. The pro- duction engineer must be given a higher status and be allowed toplay a much greater part in the aircraft industry of the future—as he was today in the U.S.A. Answering his own criticisms, the lecturer suggested that theBritish aircraft industry's programme should be: to consolidate and maintain its rurbine-engined-airliner lead; to build twofighters, an intercepter and a supersonic long-range design; to develop a supersonic bomber, licensing a "conventional nightbomber" sic) from America; and to co-operate with Europe and the U.S.A. in the very wide field of guided weapons by con-tributing one type.
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