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Aviation History
1957
1957 - 1546.PDF
634 FLIGHT | FROM ALL QUARTERS Military Transports Demonstration FOUR different types of British and American transport aircraft—two Beverleys and a Comet 2 of Transport Command, and a C-130 Hercules and C-119 Packet provided by the U.S.A.F.—were paraded at Boscombe Down last Tuesday for examination by the Air Transport Systems working party of the Anglo-Canadian-American Air Standardization Committee. In the morning all five aircraft were on static display, and in the afternoonone of the Beverleys, the C-119 and the C-130 demonstrated supply-dropping techniques over the Figheldean dropping zone.The air transport systems working party is one of several branches of the Anglo-Canadian-American Air StandardizationCo-ordinating Committee. It was not evaluating the aircraft them- selves last Tuesday but examining different items of equipment inthem with a view to standardization for joint operations. A New Prescription HOPES that the Proteus engine's icing problem may have beenfinally resolved were raised last week. Bristol have developed, and the R.A.E. successfully ground-tested, a device which directscompressor-tapped air to accelerate the boundary layer in the critical bend of the reverse-flow intake where the ice has beenaccumulating. The effect—yet to be proved in flight on Britannias —is to prevent ice deposits from building up. A modification tothe shape of the air intake duct is in hand also. Progress of the Satellite AT the beginning of this week the Russian Eardi satellite and1 its rocket case had completed more than 250 orbits of the Earth, amounting to more than 6.5 million miles. On Monday,October 21, the rocket case was 34 minutes and 10,000 miles ahead of Sputnik itself. During the preceding week the news of the satellite's progresshad fallen from first place in the world's Press, although its wider implications were the subject of much comment and discussion.On October 12, Dr. John Hagen, director of the U.S. Project Vanguard, estimated that the satellite would continue its flight forat least a year. Between October 12 and October 18 the period of the satellite's orbit shortened by about two seconds per day to95 min 45 sec, and at the later date the mean orbit height was decreasing at the rate of two miles per day. British support for the proposal (contained in the earlier 23-nation disarmament resolution) for an investigation into means of ensuring only peaceful uses for outer-space satellites and otherobjects was expressed before the United Nations General Assembly's political committee on Monday, October 14. On thefollowing day, the satellite and rocket sub-committee of the British I.G.Y. committee decided to consider proposals to establish anEarth-satellite observatory in this country. A Russian photograph of a dog inside a globe, said to have beencarried to a height of 130 miles by a rocket, was released on Wednesday, October 16; this test was stated to have formed partof preliminary studies towards manned interplanetary flight. The mean heights of satellite and rocket were this day given as 130and 100 miles respectively. A report from New York on October 17 said that Russia had inadvertently launched an Earth satellite in1953, according to Mr. James Patterson, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Soviet rocket specialists at therecent I.G.Y. meeting in Washington. This object was a high- altitude rocket said to have gone into orbit round the Earth fora few days after firing by the Soviet Army. A Russian forecast that a "lunar physical station" would be established "some time, and maybe soon" on the Moon was madein Moscow on October 18, by which time the Earth satellite had completed 200 orbits. Data obtained at Ministry of Supply establishments has con-tinued to be sent to the I.G.Y. committee of the Royal Society The main M.o.S. work has been carried out at the Royal AircraftEstablishment, Farnborough, where observations have included angular tracking by crossed radio interferometer techniques andradial velocity measurement by radio Doppler methods. Next Year's World Gliding Contest THE Soviet Union, U.S.A. and Britain are among the 19 coun-tries which have already accepted the Polish Aero Club's invitation to take part in the 1958 World Gliding Championshipsat Leszno. The contest will be held from June 15 to 29, following one week of practice flying.A maximum of four pilots may represent each country in the championships. The council of the British Gliding Associationhas decided to enter two pilots in each of the two classes, "open" and "restricted," and a pilots' meeting was to be held this weekto determine the individual entries. The first four seeded pilots in this country are Cdr. Nicholas Goodhart, Lt-Col. AnthonyDeane-Drummondj Philip Wills and Cdr. Anthony Goodhart. The Etendard and NATO TT is thought in Paris aviation circles that the Dassault Etendard•*- will be the chosen NATO light strike-fighter. While in the Armee de l'Air, Marcel Dassault's new commercial director,M. Gallois, was attached to SHAPE and was in liaison with Dr. von Karman and Col. Driscol in the evolution of the specification,so that the company is in an excellent position fully to appreciate the diinking behind it. The Sud-Aviation Baroudeur is under-stood to be well favoured by the American test pilots, probably in part because its cockpit dates from an era of more generousdimensions. Navigation's Fix Eased 'T'HE hopes expressed in our leading article of September 6•*- appear to have been to some extent realized in the findings of the sixth meeting of the I.C.A.O. Communications Division whichended in Montreal on October 14. The United States, in fact, proposed that the part of Annex 10 of the I.C.A.O. convention,including a D.M.E. specification of some five years ago which was hardly implemented, should be amended to accommodate theD.M.E. portion of Tacan. Such a system was now needed, they claimed, and was being provided at very high cost in U.S. terri-tories. The main opposition to this proposal came from the U.K. andAustralia (the latter is already a general user of D.M.E.) because they did not consider that a rho/theta system allowed the full useof airspace and efficient air traffic control for faster airliners and increasing traffic. After several years' experience with a largenumber of D.M.E. beacons in their traffic control system, the Australians felt that D.M.E. was extremely useful, but not capableof meeting future requirements. Because of this, and of the find- ings of many committees such as the Jet Operations RequirementsPanel and the Curtis Committee, neither Britain nor Australia felt that any change in the present Annex 10 material was advisable.Both countries proposed, in detailed working papers, that a special meeting of I.C.A.O., made up of communications, opera-tions and air traffic control authorities from all States, should be convened so that the problem of short-range aids should be BOWMEN: On page 647 begins the most exhaustive analysis of the Avro Aircraft Arrow to be published anywhere. These photographs show some of the personalities involved in development. From the left: Harvey R. Smith, vice-president manufacturing; Harold Young, production engineering manager; R. N. Lindley, chief engineer; J. C. Floyd, vice-president engineering; Guest Hake, Arrow project designer; Jim Chamber- I'm, chief of technical design; and experimental test pilots "Spud" Potocki and Jan Zurakowski—both seen in the mock-up.
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