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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 2168.PDF
550 AIR COMMERCE FLIGHT, 30 September 1960 SIR MATTHEW FOR THE ARBI T is announced by the Air Registration Board that BOAC's newchairman, Sir Matthew Slattery, KBE, CB, DSC, FRAes, RN(Retd), has been appointed a member of the Air Registration Board. Hetakes the place of Sir George Cribbett, former BOAC deputy chairman, who retired earlier in the year. / Sir Matthew was unanimously nominated by British operatorsand he joins Group 1 on the Council of the Board. The other serving members in this group are Lord Douglas of BEA, Mr EricRylands of Skyways, and Col R. L. Preston. RED-TAPE MEASURES ! alffii Kingdom AIR ARRIVAL CARD Government intends, notwithstanding last week's collec-tive declaration of dismay by the Airline Operators Committee representing the 40 airlines serving the UK, to press on with theintroduction of questionnaire cards to be filled in by arriving and departing British and Commonwealth air passengers. Sampleshave been printed, as illustrated below. An order is to be laid before Parliament by the Board of Tradeunder Section 10 of the Statistics of Trade Act, 1947, and the scheme is to be introduced on January 1—unless the order is annulled by Parlia-ment. Any passen- ger who does notfill in his form would, according tothe Act, be liable to a £20 fine, or twoyears in gaol and a £100 fine if he One of the pair of proposed forms (see text). On the other side of the original is Part III, a question- naire in respect of children under 15 r *»B t*t»!jp**** w«4 only tn^aitti t In Part i. PAST It Insaljm* »«(j •MW W J-*-«« III "knowingly or reck-lessly makes any statement which is CD falSe-" "a The dismay of c BOAC, BEA, the IATA independ-Qc ents and the foreign airlines concerned°ca i s hardly surprising.For years IATA's and ICAO's "facili-tation" experts have been striving toslash government red tape; some governments have been slower than others todispense with the countless forms that harass operators, passengers and shippers, but at least none—until now—has devised freshfrustration. The difficulties of distributing and collecting the proposedforms, particularly in respect of departing passengers in the chaotic conditions of LAP North, are likely to be acute. Thereare to be two types of card, one for departures, the other for arrivals, and similar forms are to be filled in by sea passengers also,as a simplification of the existing system. Passengers to and from Europe, by sea and air, will be exempt.The Ministry of Aviation seems to be an unwilling entrepreneur in the implementation of the scheme. The Board of Trade isprobably involved only because the necessary legislation can conveniently be done in their name. Obviously there is muchmore than meets the eye here—something of greater political importance than the mere collection of traffic statistics. Could itbe that the Government want to keep a check on the increasing numbers of coloured Commonwealth immigrants now enteringthe UK by air? Footnote: A BOAC spokesman said last waek: —"We have protested to the Ministry of Aviation at the proposed intro- duction of these forms. However, if the Government has decided toproceed with the proposal, we will co-operate so far as we are able to do so without engaging extra staff or incurring other costs. We willundertake to have the arrival forms distributed on incoming aircraft, but with the best will in the world we have neither the staff nor thespace at London Airport North to undertake the distribution of departure forms. We are therefore proposing that the procedure involved atdeparture should be the responsibility of the emigration authorities." Silver City have brought into use this attractive new terminal at Manston Airport, Kent, to cope with their increasing volume of business there. The new building will also be used by passengers on the London - Paris "Silver Arrow" service operated in association with British and French Railways. A special feature is the method of lighting, which is by Lumenated Ceilings, which diffuses concealed light from the whole ceiling throughout the interior of the terminal UP TO £500 FOR A LICENCE IF a British airline wants to operate a scheduled air service fromthe UK to a point outside Europe, it will have to pay (1) £200 to make the application, (2) £500 for the licence if it is granted, and(3) £500 per year for as long as it holds the licence. This is evident from a table of charges just published by the Ministrylisting the proposed fees payable in respect of the new air service licences. Other fees are as follows: — For a service to a defined area in northern Europe, the proposedcharge is £50 and the licence fee £80 a year; for a scheduled service to anywhere else in Europe or, roughly, the Mediterranean(the precise areas are again defined precisely in degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude) the operator will be liable for£100 for the application and £250 a year for the licence. For UK domestic services, the fees are respectively £25 and £40. Finally,for services originating outside the UK and destined for a point outside the UK, the fees are £200 and £500 for terminals morethan 1,500 miles apart and £100 and £250 for services less than 1,500 miles apart. Fees for inclusive tours and group charters will cost £10 toapply for. and £10 a year for the licence; Class B and Class E charters (see Flight. July 29, page 164, for the definition of thevarious classes) the fees are respectively £20 and £60. A Class C charter will cost £2 to apply for and there will be no charge forthe licence. Assuming that fees should be pavable at all—an assumptionwhich ha? been strongly contested behind the scenes by more than one British operator—the proposed scale is open to criticismon the score that fees are not related to the value of the service to be operated. For instance, an independent operating a weeklyservice from, say, a provincial UK airport to a point in north Europe will have to pay £80 a year for his licence—exactly thesame fee as another operator who might be flying a dozen-times- daily service from London to the same point. In other words, thefees are not related to the traffic-value of the licence. The scale will be in the form of a flat rate regardl«ss of the amornt ofbusiness generated bv the service concerned. The independents, as spoken for by BIATA, feel "strongly opposed" to this flat-ratemethod, and are suggesting that fees should be related to the value of the service. Some considerable sums will have to be found by BOAC andBEA in respect of licences for the routes which they already operate. Even so, £10 a time for inclusive tours and groupcharters—of which a very large number are operated every year— will also amount to no mean sum for the independents. TALKING FARES AT CANNES TOMORROW, October 1, is the date on which the very-low-farewinter excursion fares will become available on the North Atlantic. Available until March 31, and valid for 17 days, a ticketto New York will cost £125 by iet or £114 by propeller aircraft (a propeller differential of about 81 per cent). This major reduction brings the air fare lower than the 'ow^!sea fare, and it is equivalent to a passenger-mile rate of about 4d compared with about 6d for economy class. Equivalent economy-class fares, which came into effect on Julv 1 last, are £174 jet and £161 propel'er. The lowest return ?ea fare is £116. It is therefore unlikely, pending airline experience of responseto these new promotional fares, that the IATA traffic conference which has been in session at Cannes since September 19 wuintroduce any new North Atlantic fares. But South America is
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