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Aviation History
1958
1958 - 0095.PDF
FIRST AERONAUTICAL WEEKLY INTHEWORLD FOUNDED 1909 ^ and AIRCRAFT ENGINEER No 2557 Vol 73 FRIDAY 24 JANUARY 1958 Editor-in-Chief MAURICE A. SMITH D.F.C. AND BAR 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 Telegrams • Flightpres Sedist London BRANCH OFFICES Coventry 8-10 Corporation Street Telephone • Coventry 5210 Birmingham King Edward House, New Street,' 2 Telephone • Midland 7191 (7 lines) Manchester 260 Deansgate, 2 Telephone • Blackfriars 4412 (3 lines) Deansgate 3595 (2 lines) Glasgow 26B Renfield Street, C.2 Telephone • Central 1265 (2 lines) New York, N.Y. Thomas Skinner and Co. (Publishers),Ltd. Ill Broadway, 6 Telephone • Digby 9-1197 ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION Home £4 15s Od, overseas £5 Os Od. Canada and U.S.A. $15.00. Second Class Mail privileges author- ised at New York. N.Y. In this issue 100 North American X-15 103 The American Industry's Year 104 Boosting Helicopter Turbines 105 Ocean, Ice and Rotors 107 Loftleidir 108 Improving Commutator Per- formance 109 Bristol 200 111 The Army Air Corps 114 VC.10 II* Aircraft Electrical Systems— Part 1 Wingless DeterrentI N our review of the world's guided missiles last December we remarked that long-range ballistic weapons had in the past twelve months emerged from being shadowy paper projects to become a series of thunderous metal cylinders. Biggest and most thunderous in the Western world is Convair's Atlas. Atlas is, perhaps, the most impressive piece of ordnance ever built. The most hardened observer could not fail to be immensely moved—mentally, if not actually physically—by the firing of such a weapon. Size, shape and sheer presence are awesome; and the mere static firing of the rocket motors releases such power as to threaten to tear the earth asunder (and to create quite remarkable effects on the human frame should one approach nearer than half a mile). Yet it is by no means correct to regard the ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) as something in which engineering tolerances, constructional methods, materials and other factors are exceptionally new and clever. The Atlas airframe is little more than a big empty cylinder, made of ordinary materials fabricated in ways well understood by any company familiar with supersonic aircraft. The fact is that there are only two major technological advances in an ICBM: the low-drift inertial gyro system and the construction of the nose cone. For the rest, Atlas is just a transportation system. Its payload is a thermo-nuclear warhead, weighing several tons and with a yield equivalent to at least as many million tons of T.N.T. Its airframe and propulsion system are nothing like as complicated as those of a B-52 or a British V-bomber, and they are appreciably quicker and cheaper to manufacture. The real effort is needed in the guidance system, and, to an even greater degree, in the extensive ground equipment and vast firing instal- lations which complete the weapon system. Getting an ICBM into service with a user formation is a slogging match against petty failures—failures probably arising from the fact that when the part concerned was designed nobody could say just what it would have to do, or under what conditions. The next generation of ICBMs —and the orbital and hypersonic winged devices that will also be required—will be designed for predictable conditions, and should rapidly pass into service. Our own Ministry of Defence, however, must bear in mind that pilotless vehicles cannot at present promise to perform more than 60 per cent of long-range bombardment tasks—and that is a generous estimate. The One That Got AwayU NNOTICED in the shadows of the passing year a man escaped. On his head was the price of being the millionth person to fly the Atlantic in 1957. If the airlines had got hold of him he would have been besieged by Press- men, blinded by flash-bulbs, strangled with garlands and presented with a dubious medallion commemorating something of which he was sublimely unaware—that he was the first air traveller ever to follow 999,999 others across the North Atlantic in any one year. Realization that it took eight post-war years for the annual volume of this traffic to reach 500,000, but only a further four years to reach the million mark, would probably have evoked in him no more than a grunt of passing interest. The airlines knew quite a lot about this particular character. He was probably male, married and middle-aged. Very likely he was an American executive return- in* tourist-class after a longish visit to Europe. It was no accident that the airlines allowed him to travel unmolested. Although in the spring they had confidently forecast that 1957 traffic would comfortably exceed one million passengers, by the late autumn they were unhappily speculating whether or not their celebrations would have to be postponed for another year. So it was that our anonymous friend's journey, carried out in the last days of the old year, was cause for relief rather than for jubilation. This year and next will see airline publicity men waiting hopefully to announce that the airliner has replaced the ocean liner as the North Atlantic's major vehicle. Then the hunt will be on again, this time for a certain "economy-class" passenger, the two-millionth to travel in 1960—or will it be 1961?
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