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Aviation History
1959
1959 - 1203.PDF
/"-• 588 FLIGHT AIR COMMERCE B.O.A.C. No. 2 ON THE ATLANTIC AS predicted in Flight of March 20 ("Sharing the North• Atlantic Cake"), B.O.A.C. has now supplanted T.W.A. as the No. 2 North Atlantic passenger airline.This really solid achievement comes after a ten-year chase of T.W.A.; and it comes also at a time of increasingly adversecomment about the Corporation. (Sunday Express: "Bloated . . . indefensibly inefficient ... in a lamentable state." Daily Mail:"Blow some of the surplus fat off this bloated Corporation . . .") The fact remains that, on the world's most important routeduring the last three months of 1958, B.O.A.C. carried 23,387 passengers in both directions, compared with 23,080 carried byT.W.A. The disparity is small, but an extrapolation of the past ratesof growth of the two airlines suggests that it is likely to widen. No. 1 passenger carrier of the North Atlantic is, of course, PanAmerican; their total passenger load in the last quarter of 1958 was 61,510—more than T.W.A. and B.O.A.C. combined. B.O.A.C., which is flying through many adversities at thepresent time, has good reason to be proud of its achievement. The Corporation climbed into third place ten years ago, havingovertaken S.A.S., Air France and T.C.A. in 1948/49. Despite a dip in growth-rate in 1954 and 1955 (owing to capacity shortage),B.O.A.C. has thus held third place for nearly a decade—until now. The breakdown of B.O.A.C.'s North Atlantic (U.K. - NewYork) traffic in the last quarter of 1958, with load factors in parentheses, was as follows: First class, 9,403 (68 per cent);tourist, 5,427 (65 per cent); economy, 8,557 (55.5 per cent). It will be noticed that, in the period reviewed, tourist traffic was asubstantial proportion (nearly one quarter) of the Corporation's total traffic. This compares with the results of all N. Atlanticcarriers combined: tourist business has now dwindled to about one eighth of the total. Of the 17 North Atlantic carriers, threehave abolished tourist class altogether: S.A.S., El Al and Aerlinte. Footnote: A statement issued by the Corporation last week said thatU.K. - U.S. traffic (both ways) in the first quarter of 1959 was no less than 54 per cent above the first quarter or 1958. Bookings for the summerwere already 20 per cent up on last year's. HUNTING'S TROOPING CONTRACT AS foreshadowed in Flight last week (p. 516) the Air MinistryBritannia trooping contract to the Far East has been awarded to Hunting-Clan. The first flight will leave London Airport onMay 15 and thereafter there will be six flights a month. For Hunting-Clan and British and Commonwealth Shipping,who own the aircraft, the award affirms an act of faith in placing an order for two Britannia 317s specifically (although notexclusively) for the task of carrying Service personnel and their families to Singapore and Hong Kong. Several tenders, at firstbased on the use of three M.o.S. Britannia 252s, were submitted to the Air Ministry last year, but only Hunting-Clan and AirCharter backed their applications by actually operating Britannias of their own. Both Hunting aircraft are to be used on what will be virtually ascheduled service but they will also be available for a limited amount of charter work. The airline is also tendering for thetrooping contract to Aden, Nairobi and Nicosia, probably to be awarded in June, and another aircraft is on option against thisand the acceptance by the A.T.A.C. of the Very Low Fare pro- posals of Eagle, Hunting-Clan and Airwork. The interior of the Britannia 317s has been designed by CharlesButler Associates, and although a high density layout is employed the decor is "unusually luxurious" for a troop transport. Asspecified by the Air Ministry all 114 seats (manufactured by Flight Equipment) are rearward facing. The Viscount as a DC-3 replacement: This is the interior of a B Viscount 701, one of several now converted from 47 to 63 seats. Six years old, and no longer all in front-line service, they have ahead-.' taken over DC-3 routes in Germany, and will soon run the following Corporation services:—Gatwick - Cologne - Hanover, Gatwick - Jersey Gatwick-Dinard. The seats are by Aircraft Furnishing Ltd., as are tho$( in the tourist cabin of the Argentine Comet 4s now being delivered CAN 20,000 PILOTS BE WRONG? QUESTIONS of crew complement figured prominently amomthe many topics which were the subject of I.F.A.L.P.A comment and recommendation at the Association's recent four-teenth annual conference at Helsinki. I.F.A.L.P.A.'s 34 member-associations clearly reaffirmed thatthere should be a third pilot in jet transport cockpits. The pilots argue that with greater speed, more positive traffic separationand new equipment, the onus of engineering, communications, piloting and navigation is increasing the pilot's workload, andthat the specialist crew members of the past are becoming redundant. Higher aircraft speeds, for example, have encourageddirect pilot/controller communications systems and dispensed with the need for a radio operator; and positive traffic control hasresulted in pilot-operated systems such as VOR, ADF, Decca/ Dectra, VHF/DF, Consol and Loran. At first sight navigatorswould seem to have been made busier by higher speeds, but more radio navigation aids and a reduction in "dog-legs" and pressurepattern flying has increased the accent on pilot-navigation. Much the same arguments are applied to the duties carriedout by the flight engineer. Jet transports are said to be simpler to operate than the types they succeed and the net effect is toreduce the amount of minute-by-minute performance control that is needed. Monitoring is still required, the pilots say, but thefunction could equally well be performed by a trained pilot; and a third pilot would be a fail-safe precaution. Introducing trained-engineer pilots into the cockpit will not beeasy; suggestions that flight engineers should be replaced by pilots have so far been met with strikes and the threat of strikes(for example, see Flight, February 13). Shifting of the work from one specialist to another, I.F.A.L.P.A. suggest, would besimpler if crew members had the same training and the same labour organization, and fundamentally there is no reason whypilots' and engineers' organizations should not be merged. But "the nature of a labour organization [is such] that it will seek topreserve the full extent of its domain with greater vigour if its very raison d'etre is taken away ... by technological change." IN DEFENCE OF A CAPTAIN READERS of Hansard for April 16 will have been stimulatedby Sir Lionel Heald's defence of Capt. W. H. Hankin—the pilot of the B.E.A. Viscount which crashed at Prestwick a yearago. The accident was due—according to the M.T.C.A. investiga- tion—to a misreading of the altimeter (Flight, April 3, p. 478). Sir Lionel's criticisms were levelled at the Minister of Trans-port. He spoke of the "inhuman and soulless machinery" which but for his own "fire-brigade" action as an M.P., would havelost Capt. Hankin his licence. Briefly, he accused the Ministry of depriving Capt. Hankin of his statutory rights to cross-examinewitnesses and demand a public inquiry into the accident. The Minister, Mr. Harold Watkinson, said in reply that he didnot think that in the circumstances there was "cause either to withdraw or cancel Capt. Hankin's licence." If Sir Lionel thoughtthey were going to do that, "he was rather misjudging us." The Minister added: "I sincerely believe that this man had a fairdeal, but I equally accept that he may have misunderstood his position." He would therefore see whether the position as to therights of a pilot after an accident could be clarified. Footnote: Pilots are re-reading the "OPS/ENG" meeting ofI.A.T.A. which took place in London as long ago as March 2-4, 1954. One of the subjects for discussion was ambiguity of threepoint alti-meters, and there is no doubt that this report showed a great deal of wisdom-before-the-event. A sample quotation is as follows: "Studiesshow that the conventional three-pointer altimeter is a difficult instru- ment to read quantitatively. This is illustrated by the fact that of thereadings by U.S.A.F. pilots, approximately 12 per cent were in error by 1,000ft or more. Interpretation time averaged 7.1 seconds . . ." "WILL THE LOUNGE NOW WATTING . . .?" TJASSENGERS at the new Washington International Airport-*- which is now being built at Chantilly, Virginia, will move from the terminal to their aircraft in a new "mobile lounge," it has beendecided by the Federal Aviation Agency. It seems to have become generally accepted by the planners ofmodern airports that the finger-and-gate system—pioneered in America—is the classic solution to the problem of gettingpassengers to and from their aircraft. The only other generally accepted solution, now considered inefficient and out of date, isthe apron coach. That it should now be revived, albeit with a
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