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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0613.PDF
NO 2669 VOLU ME 7 7 FRIDAY 6 MAY I960 Editor-in-Chief MAURICE A. SMITH DFC Editor H.F.KING MSE Technical Editor W. T. GUNSTON Production Editor ROY CASEY IN THIS ISSUE From All Quarters 614 Flight System Survey Missiles and Spacef light Hanover Round-up 616 617 62O The Independent Outlook 623 Sport and Business 624 Red Beret Soldiers 625 Antonov An-IOA Ukraina 628 Auster D.4 in the Air 629 Straight and Level 631 The Industry 632 Power Supplies for Small Missiles 633 Correspondence 635 Air Commerce 637 Service Aviation 642 IlifTe & Sons Ltd, Dorset House, Stam-ford Street, London SE1; telephone Waterloo 3333. Telegrams FlightpresSedist London. Annual subscriptions: Home £4 15s. Overseas £5. Canadaand USA $15.00. Second Class Mail privileges authorized at New York, NY. Branch Offices Coventry: 8-10 Corpora-tion Street; telephone Coventry 25210. Birmingham: King Edward House, NewStreet, 2; telephone Midland 7191. Man- chester: 260 Deansgate, 3; teleyjhoneBlacki'riars 4412 or Deansgate 3f>95. Glasgow: 20H Renfleld Street, C2;telephone Central 1265. New York, NY: Thomas Skinner & Co(Publishers) Ltd, 111 Broadway 6; telephone Digby 9-1197. © Iliffe & Sons Ltd, I960. Permissionto reproduce illustrations and letterpress can be granted only under written agree-ment. Brief extracts or comments may be made with due acknowledgement. AIRCRAFT, SPACECRAFT, MISSILES Official Organ of the Royal Aero Club First Aeronautical Weekly in the World Founded 1»09 Lobby and LeakT O a technical journal such as our own there is nothing more exasperating than to hear information of significant professional interest publicly blabbed by politician or smart-alec observers of the scene in flagrant contempt of security regulations. True, those same regulations are only too often provoca- tive of fury in themselves; but their unilateral violation, or expedient disregard, is more frequently anti-social or unpatriotic in origin than it is morally justifiable. We are reminded of this sorry state of affairs by a comment made by Frank Beswick in his report on the Blue Streak debate (page 617). Though it is not possible, he points out, to legislate against gossiping and lobbying at cocktail parties, it is surely undesirable that responsible parliamentary spokesmen should have to rely heavily upon information gleaned on such occasions. There is always the tendency, Mr Beswick observes, for those whose opinions are not accepted, or whose products are not being sold, to lobby the most vigorously; and, apart from any question of ethics, a balanced judgment is more difficult to reach when the discontented have had the biggest say. Those MPs who have been asking for some form of Commons Defence Committee, on American lines, by which means Ministers and departmental heads could be questioned in a rational manner, have surely had their case strengthened by the recent debate. A more sinister sort of chicanery than the lobby is the leak. Defence regula- tions should remain as inviolable as Magna Carta; yet the practice of leaking supposedly confidential information for commercial or political advantage may be passing uncensured. Untidiness in matters of national security is undesirable. Messiness would be unpardonable. Questions of Airworthiness THE airworthiness standards of transport aircraft should, we feel, be agreedby a single world authority. This is not such an unattainable ideal: the International Civil Aviation Organization now recommends a code which, so far as it goes, has been universally agreed. And the codes of the two major airliner-manufacturing nations, the US and the UK, are closer than they have ever been betore—after many years of patient give-and-take on both sides. We believe that British influence has been considerable in this field; a topical example is the BOAC Boeing 707 modification programme called for by the Air Registration Board, to whose chief test pilot particular credit must go. But it is odd that in this country the Air Registration Board clears transport aeroplanes for civil users only (a special exception being the Comet 2s of RAF Transport Command, which were required to have civil certificates). What happens when the same type of transport aircraft—e.g., Britannia and Argosy— is ordered for the RAF as well as by civil operators? The answer is that the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Aviation weigh in with what amount to their own standards. These Ministries must of course have their say in the acceptance of combat aircraft. But when we have an ARB to assess the airworthiness of transport aeroplanes, is it not a waste of taxpayers' money for Ministries to duplicate the job? The RAF must, again, have its special user requirements; but, so far as airworthiness and inspection requirements are concerned, why cannot the ARB code suffice?
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