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Aviation History
1959
1959 - 0222.PDF
16 January 1959 99 Qj Straight and Level BE prepared for a walk-out byPlummet Air Lines from theforthcoming meeting of the I.A.T.A. Hemlines Conference. Theprevious meeting, it may be recalled, ended in a deadlock. No agreementcould be reached on the reported B.E.A. proposal for a skirt-differential of 2jinbetween air girls with fat legs and air girls with slim ones. The more gallant airlines regardedthis (to quote Plummet) as "unfair and improper discrimination which willthreaten the whole structure of inter- national air girl skirt agreements, not tomention the public interest." If no agreement is reached at the nextmeeting it will be up to the Government to decide hemline levels. It may or maynot be significant that an M.T.C.A. dele- gation has reportedly already left forMontreal to attend an emergency session of I.C.A.O., the International CivilAviation Organization. • Go it, Lady Douglas. One of my reporters spoke to her last week about B.E.A.'s low hemlines. "I had no idea, when I casually mentioned them to Sholto," she said, "that it would lead to all this fuss!" From left to right: Miss Ann Hale, Lufthansa; Miss Lydia Jarvenets, B.E.A.; Miss Paula Klein, Sabena Never mind, my dear lady. Two other things you might mention to him, as they vitally affect the future of Britain as an air-trading nation, are the frumpish thickness of some of his air girls' high heels, and those school-marmy feather devices in their hats. Passing thought: Eagle Airways (Bermuda) air girls are exempt from the controversy—they wear shorts. I am not so sure about Wien Alaska Airlines— their girls wear trousers and snow- boots. • It was quite a variegated week for airnews. My team of reporters has been filing stories not only on hemlines, buton our solar system's new man-made planet, the happy ending to the SmallWorld balloon epic, and on the de-fuzing (by F/L. J. W. Waters, R.A.F., and aGerman colleague) of an unexploded British bomb revealed when the SorpeReservoir in North Rhine Westphalia was drained. I dofi my hat to all con-cerned, and to the Air Ministry spokes- man who told me:— "The bomb was dropped shortly before10.00 hr on the morning of October 15, 1944, by a Lancaster Mk 1 of No. 9Squadron R.A.F. Bomber Command based at Bardney, Lines. The raid was by a largeformation of Lancasters escorted by Mus- tangs, and was led by W/C. J. M. Bazin,D.F.C., of Newcastle." All right, all right! I only asked. • As for the Sun's new satellite, I can-not help wondering who on Earth now owns it. My expert adviser on spacetechnology and law, Sir Justin Galaxy, said to me last week with cosmic humi-lity : "I don't know." I imagine the matter will not go beforethe courts until, in 300 years' time, the Society of Space Antiquarians chartersa Scruggs S.A.423 Spacematic for a weekend space-archaeology outing tolocate it. With a good driver, Interstella Decca Mk 10, plenty of knitting patternsfor the old ladies, and a bit of luck, they could draw up alongside the thing,chuck out a tow-rope and bring it back for M.o.S. experts to examine. Then,armed with its secrets, Britain could Catch Up In The Space Race. • "The Astronomer Royal, Dr.Richard Woolley, returned to London by air today from South Africa. "Dr. Woolley was asked at LondonAirport about a statement attributed to Prof. Anatoli Blagonravov, head of theSoviet Academy of Sciences, that Russia may try to land a manned rocketon Mars or Venus in the autumn. "He said: 'If they get to Venus theywill find it is boiling hot. If they get to Mars they will find it freezing cold. Onneither planet will they be able to breathe. The best of luck to them.'"—Reuter, January 8. • "Real hairy griff, straight from theequine intake" is how The Architect's Journal describes Flight's special mis-siles number of December 5,1958. Under the heading Not Quite Archi-tecture, Mr. Reyner Banham quotes large chunks of our "hairy griff," andobserves: "You will be humiliatingly aware that it is ... a technology severaltechnologies in advance of the sort of technology that building business thinksof as advanced . . . For all that dough you could have vaporized practicallyevery outstanding problem in building and town-planning .. ." Other specialist journals might havesaid the same about the still unsolved problems of their professions. As I'veremarked before, man could build a paradise on earth with the brains andmoney he has spent on missiles. I made a quick check from our special numberof how much America has so far spent on missiles. It tots up to a cool£6,000,000,000—and it is probably in fact much, much more. But so long as the hairy missile boys wish the money could be better spent—which I believe all of them do, no less than the Architects Journal — thenthere's honour in the arsenals of the West. Already there are signs thatspace-exploration will soon be more important than making weapons. • Recently I commented on the factthat some aircraft never seem to be on the ground, while others always are.Helicopters are particularly prone to low utilization. But a recent intensive-flyingprogramme by the U.S. Army has shown that a well-developed helicopter can logtime as rapidly as can a fixed-winger. Two Sikorsky H-34 Choctaws (S-58s)and two Venol H-21 Shawnees were in- volved. During a period of 82 days thesemachines flew 4,000 hr. Mean utiliza- tion : 12 hr 11 min daily per helicopterfor nearly three months. Col. Manuel dos Santos Lage, head of Brazil's Felix I rocket project, checks Felix in the Brazilian Army technical school laboratories near Bio de Janeiro. The 875 1b rocket is to be fired with a cat on board. Col. Lage hopes that the cat, Flamengo, will return to earth safely, as it is the pet of his two children • From the Admiralty I learn that the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Warrior, now re- commissioned as the Argentine Navy's A.RA Independencia, has arrived at Buenos Aires. The task of recommissioning her must have been quite exerting for the Argen- tine sailors. It was, says the Admiralty, "a task performed by a steaming crew of 300 men ..." ROGER BACON
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