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Aviation History
1960
1960 - 2314.PDF
614 FLIGHT, 14 October I960 Straight and ve I WHEN I saw the proposed modelof BEA's new £3^m terminalin West London the following thinks-bubble might have been observedrising from my head. Thinks: Good gracious, it seems notime at all since we used to check in at the air terminal near Waterloo Station,just up the road from Flight's office. What happened to that place? Oh yes,it had to be demolished to make way for the new Shell building. That's right, sothey built quite an elaborate new place down the Cromwell Road. It cost£250,000, if I remember. That was only three years ago, and now they'regoing to build a completely new place on the same site. I wonder why theycouldn't have done that in the first place and saved a bit of money? Further thinks: Which reminds me,BO AC have just done up their London - air terminal at Victoria, and very stylishit looks too. Must have cost at least £lm. But I wonder why BOAC andBEA couldn't have shared one air ter- minal in the same city to get theirpassengers to the same airport? And had a common bus transport service tothe airport? And both saved a lot of '. money? Final thinks: I must write a pieceabout this for the column sometime, strong stuff about the need for closerBOAC-BEA co-operation, etc. • "Yes, it looks a good aeroplane. I'm sure that you'll have no difficulty in selling it, except to me." • "We are still drifting on the mostimportant single factor in the whole of Britain's economy, aerospace policy.Hence the importance of the Prime Minister setting up an independenttribunal with the least possible delay." —Sir Roy Fedden, in a letter to theDaily Telegraph. '•••' Whenever anyone, even someone ofSir Roy Fedden's calibre, suggests that we appoint a committee of wise men tosolve our problems, I go all numb. If something is worth doing (sorry to,. sound pompous), then let it be con- ,„* ceived, designed, constructed and sold^ —whether to a Ministry or any other customer—by men who are prepared torisk a lot of their own money on it, and whose livelihood depends on the right-ness of their conception, the skill of their design, the soundness of their construc- tion, and the vigour of their selling. If Sir Roy's committee is appointed, and its members really are wise men, that's the way they'll decide things should be done, and the way that public money should be spent. Did she use VTO or STO? Has she developed a Martin-Baker complex; or did somebody put <* tint ark on the top step? These are matters which the serious student of aeronautics might well cogitate. Of even greater moment is that she is 21, a New Zealander named Diana McLean, and that her address is RAF Duxford • One of the most original charactersin British aviation was Noel Pemberton Billing, founder of Supermarine. Whenhe registered that evocative, and now world-famous, name he resolved toapply it to "a boat that will fly rather than an aeroplane that will float." And,of course, the great line of Supermarine flying-boats followed that tradition tothe letter. Now both the name and the traditionseem doomed to oblivion. Which is deplorable; because what was formerlythe Supermarine Division of Vickers- Armstrongs is today building hovercraft.And I can think of no vehicle to which Pemberton Billing's precept, and thegreat name he coined for it, could be more fittingly applied. • America's new turbine airliners wereintroduced into public service two years ago this month. No one was worriedabout the Electra, though a lot of people, including me (September 26,1958), wereworried about the 707. Who would have believed in October Who said the Fleet Air Arm was just the air branch of the Royal Navy ?* * Exhibition caravanmade by Sprite Ltd of Newmarket 1958, when the first Electras and 707swere being delivered, that during the first two years of operation the Electrawould suffer five write-offs in airline service, killing 223 passengers andcrews, while the 707 (though killing a number of trainee crew members)would not scratch a passenger? Who would have believed it? Some day I shall write an essay on thesubject of aviation safety, the theme of which will be that what might at firstappear to be unsafe in aviation may well prove to be relatively safe, and viceversa. Such a theory may seem irrational tothose who, like the insurance companies, have a hunch that the faster an aeroplaneflies the more crashes it will have. I don't want to fit any new theories to theunexpected experience of the last two years. Nor do I want to malign the un-lucky Electra, an aeroplane which could still prove to be among the safest everbuilt. All I will venture to say is that, in aviation, hunches about safety can bedangerous. • From an Alitalia advertisement abouttheir "Super DC-8": — "Its exceptional autonomy [my italics]permits non-stop nights between Italy and North America." Yes, a bit more self-government forthe world's aircraft might not be too bad a thing. You can just imagine thebrochures: "The airliner with unpre- cedented autonomy . . . Years ahead inautonomies . . . Unrivalled autonomous experience." I can imagine aircraft with excep-tional autonomy appealing to the air- lines of the newly independent Afro-Asian nations. In which case British genius for conferring autonomy uponsuch countries should give us a tremen- dous lead in ... oh, shut up. • "He's so technical even the patternon his check shirts is logarithmic." Tyred Superlative • The new "mobile lounge" designedby the US Federal Aviation Agency for Washington's new Dulles internationalairport will, they say, be "the largest passenger-carrying vehicle ever built tobe operated on rubber tyres." What— bigger than the big jets they will service? Here's another superlative from thesame source—a source which, in fair- ness, I ought to say generally issuesreally useful factual information with the minimum of hyperbolic embellish-ment : — "In mixing the concrete for the run-ways," the FAA informs us, "the con- tractor employed three concrete mixers,each the largest in the world." ROGER BACON
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