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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 0769.PDF
FLIGHT, 3 June 1960 Correspondence The Editor of "Flight" is not necessarily in agreement with the views expressed by correspondents in these columns. Names and addresses of writers, not for publication in detail, must in all cases accompany letters. Airline Captains' Pay I AM grateful to Mr Beven [Correspondence, May 20] for draw-ing attention to the anomalous position which exists in connec- tion with airline captains' pay. This is one which the Associationhas been attempting to correct for many years. It was thought that Section 15 of the Civil Aviation Act was designed to ensurethat independent operators observed the same terms and condi- tions of employment as the corporations for persons engaged incomparable work; but, so far, in successive visits to arbitration the principle of pilots flying the same aircraft receiving the samepay has not been accepted except in respect of two isolated cases brought to the attention of the Industrial Court under very specialcircumstances which do not obtain in the mass of services operated by the independent operators. The situation to which your corre-spondent draws attention has been one which the Association has condemned over a long period of time. Incidentally, the result of the latest application to the IndustrialCourt was not a rejection of the Association's claim for salary in- creases. The Court referred back that claim, in respect of quantumto the two parties (the Association and the independent operators), for further examination, whilst laying down that the structure whichpermits the anomalous situation to exist should remain in being. Harlington, Middx D. FOLLOWS,General Secretary, British Air Line Pilots Association Cranwell's Earliest Days THE article "Cranwell's Earliest Days" [February 5] was readby the undersigned with great interest, as I served at this unit from the late summer of 1917 to February 1918. I was, however,disappointed with the lack of information covering the First World War role and activities of Cranwell, which at that time was one ofthe most important training establishments of the RNAS. It is true that many hundreds of pilots were trained at Cranwellprior to 1920 including the late King George VI, who, as Prince Albert, Duke of York, was stationed there 1917-18. No doubtthere are many hundreds of ex-RNAS personnel who will recollect that smooth and flawless aerobatic performance by Fit CdrHinchcliffe in his black-strutted B.E.2C. Mr Corlett's article states that the training of boy mechanicsstarted in February 1920, whereas active training of boys in wire- less telegraphy was in operation, to my personal knowledge, inthe early part of 1917, if not before. The school buildings were located down past the MT garages and behind the officers' qu~r-ters on the Cranwell village road, past the site of the railway spur line station. Here instruction was given in the morse code, thetheory of wireless telegraphy, the servicing of receivers and trans- mitters, semaphore and morse flag signalling, flashing, the inter-national and naval code flags and operating procedures. Cranwell at that time was commanded by Rear AdmiralJohn Luce, who previously commanded HMS Glasgow at the Battle of Coronel in the early days of the war. The commanderwas Cdr Talbot, and Fit Cdr Lidderdale was the first lieutenant or "No 1." The CO of the wireless school was Lt Cdr J. C.Collinson, with WO Hartley as the chief instructor. The boys attending the school were mostly recruited at Worm-wood Scrubs Naval Air Station in the West End of London. and at the time of entry were between the ages of 17 and 17^years, in order that by the time they were 18 years old, they would be fully trained aerial wireless operators and observers.Thus the boys were the nucleus of the first non-commissioned aircrew in the RAF when it was formed on April 1, 1918. I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with the authorof the article, on which he should be warmly congratulated. Ottawa N. A. NUNN (ex-RNAS, and Sqn Ldr RCAF, 1940-46) An 1867 "Jet" TN the February 19 issue of Flight I wrote about the Russian* engineer, Theodor R. Geshvend, who designed and built a jet aircraft. Recently I discovered another Russian pioneer of jetflight—the Guards Artillery captain, de Telecheff, retired (1828- 1895) who lived in Paris. Here he became imbued with burningenthusiasm for heavier-than-air flying, and he and the lawyer Michel Michniewicz in August 1864 designed an aeroplane carry-ing 120 passengers(!), their provisions and water, with a top speed of 40km/hr, for ten hours of flight. This giant aircraft wasPowered by an engine. This invention, entitled "Un systeme de navigation aerienne" was patented in the Ministry of Commerceand Travaux Publiques on October 1864. Capt de Telecheff offered this invention to the Russian War Ministry, but a commis- 777 sion of members of the Academy of Sciences and War Ministryinferred that the invention was a dream! In August 1867 de Telecheiff patented in Paris another invention,"Un systeme perfectionne de navigation aerienne"—an aeroplane (triangular, "delta" shape) powered by a jet engine, the fuelkerosine. It is a strange coincidence that this triangular aircraft is very similar to the Soviet triangular jet aeroplane built byP. O. Sukhoi. From the records of the VII Department of the Imperial Tech-nical Society, 1880-1890, I found that de Telecheff in 1885 sub- mitted to the War Minister of Russia the design of an airship—a combination of an aerostat with an aeroplane, but this invention was also declined. The patents of the inventions of de Telecheff and the model ofthe delta jet plane remain in the Musee Nationale d'Aeronautique at Paris. It is of interest to note that both inventions of de Telecheffwere unknown in the Soviet Union, and the aviation public opinion of the USSR was very surprised when I received informa-tion and the designs of both aircraft from Paris. Tartu, USSR E. MEOS "Air Transport as a System" ALTHOUGH there is much in Mr J. E. D. Williams' twor*- articles [April 22 and 29] with which one might agree, some of his assertions will certainly cause surprise, and perhaps someamusement, to any professional specialist navigators who chance upon them. Taking his comments on long-range navigation first, there isthe rather wild statement that aircraft (over the North Atlantic) rarely know where they are and never know where they are going.An aircraft fitted with a properly operating Dectra installation does know its position within reasonable limits, and although thevery experienced navigators of non-Dectra-equipped aircraft have to use methods which tell them only where they were in the recentpast, the lag between the time of the fix and its appearance on the chart—one to three minutes normally—makes a DR positionascertained immediately afterwards a reasonably accurate assess- ment of the aircraft's position. Also, since the other reason forfixing is to obtain the immediate past wind velocity, so that in conjunction with the other information available the most probableimmediate future wind can be assessed by the navigator to give him his most probable future track and ground speed (and onlyoccasionally does this prove to be violently in error) the navigator does have a good idea as to the aircraft's future flight-path.A great advantage of Doppler so far as the North Atlantic, North Pacific and Arctic routes are concerned is that it shouldshow the navigator at any time he cares to glance at it, with the aid of his computer, the present wind velocity; in the past hehad only his forecast and past found winds. This will enable him to assess the future likely wind with greater accuracy without thepresent time lag thus improving tracking and ETAs. Long-range navigation is admittedly complicated but it is not"an unmitigated mess." It is also quite wrong to say that the navigator is subjected to "a mass of unco-ordinated . . . irrele-vant information." The navigator obtains almost all his own flight navigational information and does not waste time obtaining any-thing irrelevant, and the information he co-ordinates himself. That is his job.Mr Williams does not seem to be aware of current astro methods and does not appear to understand how they still retainconsiderable importance—even at 400-500 knots! The "exten- sive manual computation" occupies 4min to 5min for a three-starfix, the whole operation from picking up the Air Almanac to the appearance of the fix on the chart taking approximately 17minwhen the navigator is really experienced. With position-lines plotted between sights the time difference between the fix andits appearance on the chart is 2min, i.e., 20 n.m. at 600kt—not "100 miles back." In mid-ocean, where the angular cut of twoLoran position-lines can be quite small, one N-S astro position line taken 6min before the time of the fix and run-up oftenimproves the accuracy of the fix very considerably. If astro alone has to be used, fixes at 40min intervals are well within a goodnavigator's capacity. If Loran (plus Consol if available) is being used a fix every 30min is normal but this can be reduced to every15min if high winds differing wildly from the forecast are being obtained.A Loran position-line under average conditions takes the navigator about a minute to obtain—hardly "fairly laborious"—and whether it provides only "limited information" is arguable. Whether or not one can fix one's way across the Atlantic usingLoran alone depends upon a number of factors, but it is not infrequently done. The major factors are (a) day or night (greaternight range); (b) the route, the routes norm of rhumb-line London - Gander and south of Cape Farewell having the bestcoverage; (c) ionospheric conditions; (d) the aerial system of the aircraft.Often the arrangement of the Loran aerial appears to have been delegated by the designer to the most recently joined officeboy, although, remembering the number of aircraft that have
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