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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0036.PDF
34 AIR COMMERCE . . . FLIGHT, 6 January 1961 of Commons that negotiations were to be opened with HandleyPage, and also with Avro, with a view to purchasing three Heralds and three 748s at a cost of about £750,000 per contract. Hesaid that the commercial prospects of these aircraft would be improved by "an early demonstration of their efficiency in regularoperation on normal services in the UK." According to the original plan, the Heralds were to be operatedby BEA on Scottish routes for a period of five years, at the end of which they would be bought from the Government if theyproved satisfactory. Eighteen months have now gone by, and still the contract between Handley Page and the Ministry ofAviation has not been signed. Meanwhile BEA's three Heralds (Series 100) are in production, and the first—according to aHandley Page spokesman at the SBAC Display last September— will be delivered to BEA towards the end of this month, January1961, and the following two in February. Asked to comment on Lord Douglas's statement, a Ministryspokesman was "not prepared to say more than that negotiations are continuing." He could give no reasons for the delay.The most likely explanation is that the Minister of Aviation, Mr Peter Thorneycroft, has been unwilling to sanction publicexpenditure on an aircraft which, should Handley Page ever join Hawker Siddeley might, in his view, be bought off infavour of the Avro 748 (though never announced, Hawker Siddeley decided nearly a year ago not to proceed with the pro-posed Ministry 748 order, possibly because of royalty strings. It is believed that an order for 748s for the RAF is in any casenow in the offing). Thus if BEA are to operate Heralds a way must be found to break the deadlock between the Ministry ofAviation and Handley Page. Speaking on the same occasion as Lord Douglas, Sir FrederickHandley Page said of reports that an American firm [McDonnell] were making a take-over bid for his company: "As for therumour of American control, this is comparable to the National Gallery or the British Museum passing to foreign interests.Indeed, no foreign company has enough money to buy Handley Page talents." Negotiations with the Americans, he said, "con-cern our efforts to sell Heralds in the United States. We hope that McDonnell, for example, will sell Heralds in US markets.Reciprocally we could build and sell some of their aircraft." EMPTY COCKPITS AT HAMBLE '"PHIS week Sir Matthew Slattery and Lord Douglas of Kirtle-A side, chairmen of the British airline corporations, were visiting the college of air training at Hamble. Afterwards they were tobe asked to review the reasons why recruitment of budding airline pilots has fallen short of the numbers required. The shortage of candidates for jobs where starting salaries are£1,000 a year and where annual rewards may eventually top £5,000 seems surprising, since the personal cost of this expensivetraining compares favourably with that of a university education. Personal outlay is about £700 for a training that, according to theprincipal of the college, AVM E. C. Bates, is worth about £8,000, and may be much less if a local-authority grant is received. Nevertheless, competition from the universities and fromindustry, reluctance of parents and headmasters to see boys embarking on a career involving even a degree of personal hazard,and a shortage of sufficient boys with adequate qualifications, has limited the number of applications for training which the corpora-tions receive. When the college opened, BOAC had managed to select for 50 vacancies only 41 boys. For this number 260applicants were called for interview from some 1,500 enquiries that BEA and BOAC had received. Although the two corporations may be disappointed so quicklyto have encountered a recruiting problem, the difficulty was not entirely unexpected, competition from the Services, fromuniversities and from the industry being of concern to Mr G. V. Hole (Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Aviation and a memberof the college board) at the time when formation of a national college was announced in Novem-ber 1959. To allow a final selection of about 100 students a year tobe made the college needs at least 600 annual applications from boysaged between 18 and 20 (or up to 24 in the case of universitygraduates). BEA alone estimate that they will need 100 new pilotsby the autumn of 1962. Bringing additional technical strength to air transport managers and consul- tants Curtis Greensted Associates Ltd, which he is joining, is Mr T. H. Farnsworth, recently chief of flight operations, BOAC Quebecair's Canadair 540 has been in operation on the 1,600 miles-a- day route Montreal - Quebec - Rimouski - Seven Islands - Wabush and Knob Lake since August at a daily utilization of Wthr. The round trip has not been completed on only two occasions and load factor achieved has been between 80 and 85 per cent on all segments of the route, average stage-length on which is about 200 miles NOT THE SAME AIR UNION THE early optimistic predictions for Air Union are not nowlikely to materialize. The thoughts of the four member nations (France, West Germany, Italy and Belgium) are nowturning to "a much more cautious approach." This is said by the retiring chairman of Lufthansa, Dr Kurt Weigelt, as reportedby Interavia. A revealing passage is to the effect that the member airlines are to form subsidiary companies to meet the Air Unionrequirements—a concept very different from that of one integrated airline, which was the original dream three years agoProblems cited by Dr Weigelt are: (1) The political situation in Africa, where the French andBelgian carriers have interests, has complicated the negotiations. (2) The system of financial accounting to be adopted hasproved difficult to solve, an equitable balance of performance, equipment, depreciation and so forth having been difficult tofind. (3) The proposed quotas, i.e. slices of the Air Union cake,have been changed. Another difficulty may well have been the diversity of equip-ment bought by the member airlines, which will have made it difficult to achieve a co-ordinated equipment policy along thelines of the SAS/Swissair consortium. THE UK SAFETY RECORD IF it is agreed that air safety is a subject about which as muchinformation as possible should be promptly disseminated, then the annual accident survey published by the Ministry ofAviation must be regarded as disappointing. The latest edition, relating to the year 1958, has recently been published*. This isthe Ministry's tenth annual survey of accidents to aircraft on the British Register. So far as accidents to aircraft engaged in air transport areconcerned, the document lists thirteen accidents of which six were fatal but of which only one (to the BEA Viscount whichcollided with an Italian Air Force Sabre over Italy in October, 1958) occurred to a scheduled service. In terms of fatalities per 100 million passenger-miles (thecommonly accepted index for air transport's accident rate) the UK figure in the year 1958 works out exactly to the generally"acceptable" figure of 1.0. Looking at the safety record of UK scheduled operators duringthe five years up to 1958, the survey shows that the rate fell from 2.6 in the five years ending 1957 to 2.0. This figure compares withthe international (ICAO) scheduled-service fatality rate over the same period of less than 1.2. It is perhaps unkind to point out that these figures could havebeen worked out nearly two years ago, when MoA air traffic figures for the year 1958 were published; but it is not easy tounderstand why compilation of this document should have taken almost two years to complete. Certainly it could be improvedby being more promptly circulated, if the names of operators were included, and also if more information could be given aboutthe circumstances and causes of accidents and (entirely absent from the Ministry's survey) recommendations for their futureavo'dance. The survey's record of accidents to a;rcraft not engaged onpublic transport shows that there were 119, 19 of them fatal— more than in any other post-war year. Of these no fewer than 92 M Survey of the Accidents to Aircraft of the United Kingdom inthe year ended December 31, 1958. HM.SO, price 2s 6d.
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