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Aviation History
1958
1958 - 0271.PDF
FLIGHT, 28 February 1958 285 Ossun airport, six miles from Lourdes, is being enlarged to cater for the growing volume of air traffic. Two Starways DC-3s are seen to the left of the new air terminal, construction of which is nearly complete. CIVIL AVIATION THE D.H.121 CONSORTIUM /"\N Wednesday, February 19, the first Board meeting of the Air-v-f craft Manufacturing Company was held at Hatfield. The seven directors of the new company—formed to develop, produceand market the D.H.121—have been selected from the boards of the three parent companies, de Havilland Aircraft Company, Ltd.,Fairey Aviation Company, Ltd., and Hunting Aircraft, Ltd. Chairman of the new company is Mr. W. E. Nixon (chairman,de Havilland), the deputy chairman is Mr. Richard Fairey and the managing director Mr. A. F. Burke; the other directors are Mr.C. P. M. Hunting, Mr. A. S. Kennedy (de Havilland), Mr. F. E. N. St. Barbe (de Havilland) and Mr. W. A. Summers (Hunting). The nominal capital of the Aircraft Manufacturing Company isat present £100, shared in the'proportion de Havilland 67^ per cent, Hunting 22i per cent and Fairey 10 per cent. At the initialboard meeting it was agreed that capital would soon have to be increased to £lm, the basis of allocation remaining as at present. Four executive teams—finance and administration, technicalorganization, production, and marketing—are already being appointed from the ranks of the three parent companies. The original Aircraft Manufacturing Co. (known as Airco) wasfounded by George Holt-Thomas during the First World War and, with Geoffrey de Havilland as designer, was responsible forproducing the early D.H. types. Immediately after the war Holt- Thomas, using Airco D.H.4s, had the distinction of inaugurat-ing Britain's first scheduled air service, London-Paris. Not long afterwards the company was taken over by B.S.A., the aircraftmanufacturing side being abandoned but the air transport activities (under the name Daimler Airways) continuing until 1924,when services were bought out by Imperial Airways. Since the days of George Holt-Thomas the name Airco has beenadopted by another British company. For this reason the old abbreviation will not be used by the new consortium: a suitableshort title has not yet been decided upon. AIR SERVICES TO MOSCOW TNAUGURATION of a direct air service between London and-*- Moscow came a big step nearer with the departure last week of an 18-man British team to Moscow to discuss the technicalaspects of the proposed service. The principal items on the agenda related to engineering arrangements, traffic control and naviga-tional aids available on the sector between Copenhagen and Moscow. Illustrative of the present knowledge of Russian facilitieswas the fact that the Viscount 802 used to convey the delegation carried in its hold a specially made Dagenite battery starting unit,taken to avoid possible embarrassment arising from the severe weather conditions expected at Moscow. The day on which the British team returned to the UnitedKingdom saw B.E.A.'s chairman, Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, fly out to Moscow to continue discussions with Air Marshal Zhigarev.An important topic to be considered was the relationship between the London - Moscow service, and services eastward from Moscow.On February 12 a Tu-104 (with 105 passengers on board) took off from the Russian capital on the first regular jet flight toVladivostock. This 4,750-mile journey now takes 11 hours (to Tokyo would take an extra hour) and could allow a passengertravelling from the U.K. to the Far East to save about 20 hours on the schedules offered by B.O.A.C. and other European airlines.Present in Moscow to witness departure of the Tu-104 was an Indian delegation engaged in negotiations over the proposed ser-vice between Moscow and Delhi. It is likely that inauguration of this service will almost coincide with that of the London - Moscowservice, and will open up an alternative route to India. Aeroflot will place Tu-104s on the Delhi service, the one intermediatestop being made at Tashkent. Air-India will use L.1049Gs. GUN LAW ACCOUNTS of airliners being forced to divert by Communist• agents, and pilots and passengers threatened with violence, belong more to fiction—or to the story of Shangri-La—than toreal life. Nevertheless, something very much akin to this apparently happened on the borders of North and South Korea onMonday of last week when a DC-3 of Korean National Airlines, on a flight between Pusan and Seoul was "diverted" into NorthKorea. Among the 32 people on board were an American pilot, Col Howard McClennan, U.S.A.F., who was acting as co-pilot (heis an adviser to the South Korean Air Force), Col Kim Ki Wan, chief information officer of the South Korean Air Force, twoGerman sales agents, a South Korean Member of Parliament, and two men wearing South Korean Army uniform. These two men,suspected by the Korean national police of being Communist agents, forced the pilot to fly into North Korea. The Communist radio at Pyongyang claimed that the airlinepassengers had landed north of the 38th parallel because they "could no longer put up with the daily pressure of the FascistGovernment, Imperialist oppression and the war policy of the American Imperialists." They quoted Hwang Hae Soo, who wasidentified as one of the passengers—although there was no record of his name on the passenger manifest at Pusan. North Korea laterrejected a formal United Nations demand for return of the aircraft. Korean National Airlines operate three DC-3s and one DC-4. The following day, the Lebanese airline Air Libane werealso in political difficulties. One of their aircraft was forced to land at Damascus by Syrian jet fighters while on its way fromBeirut to Jerusalem. It was being flown by an American pilot, who denied the Syrian allegation that he had flown over a forbid-den military area; and he added that his take-off from Beirut was made 55 minutes after Syria claimed that her radar had detectedthe aircraft. The journey was continued six hours later. B.E.A. and M.T.C.A, officials, suitably clad in fur caps and collars, departing for Moscow to discuss the technical details of the proposed service linking the Russian and British capitals. Viscount G-AOHO was the first foreign turboprop to visit Russia.
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