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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0073.PDF
No 706 VOLU ME 7 9 FRIDAY 20 JANUARY 1961 Editor-in-Chief IAURICE A. SMITH OFC Editor H . F. KING MBE W . Technical Editor T. GUNSTON Production Editor ROY CASEY Managing Director H. N. PRIAULX MBE IN THIS ISSUE From All Quarters 72 Light Tactical Transport 74 Missiles and Space-flight 76 Air Law versus Science 79 Airliner Census 81 Buccaneering on the Moor 87 Flight System Survey 9O Sport and Business 91 Trends in Propulsion 92 Straight and Level 93 The Industry 94 Service Aviation 95 Air Commerce 96 Correspondence 101 11 iff e Transport Publications Ltd, DorsetHouse, Stamford Street, London SE1; telephone Waterloo 3333. TelegramsFiightpres London SE1. Annual sub- scriptions: Home £4 15s. Overseas £5.Canada and USA $15.00. Second Class Mail privileges authorized at NewYork, 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: telephoneBlackfriars 4412 or Deansgate 3595. Glasgow; 62 Buchanan Street Cl; tele-phone Central 1265-6. New York. NY: Thomas Skinner & Co(Publishers) Ltd, 111 Broadway 6; telephone Digby 9-1197. © Hiffe Transport Publications Ltd,1BB1. Permission to reproduce illustra- tions and letterpress can be granted onlyunder written agreement. Brief extracts or comments may be made with dueacknowledgement. AIRCRAFT, SPACECRAFT, MISSILES Official Organ of the Royal Aero Club First Aeronautical Weekly in the World Founded 1909 Aviation's Future LawsI N the race that is human progress it seems inevitable that the law will tail along behind science and technology. It is accepted that legal rules cannot keep pace with the new facts, processes and ideas of scientific thought and action. But as far as aviation is concerned it has been left to Mr Harold Caplan, in the Royal Aeronautical Society lecture reported on pages 79-80 of this issue, to call attention to the seriousness of this situation and its implications, to question its inevitability, and to suggest what might be done about it. The descriptive phrase "legal drag" was coined by the lecturer to indicate the resistance to progress—which could eventually turn into a danger to the livelihood of aeronautical engineers—caused by (1) regulations governing scheduled and non-scheduled air traffic, (2) the prospect of restrictive rules concerning supersonic transports, and (3) the tyranny of documentation. A further conflict is the discrepancy between technical responsibility and legal liability in, for example, the case of aircraft accidents. The scientific facts could indicate the technical cause of the accident, and hence the technical responsibility. From the same set of basic facts, however, a different answer could be produced— that of the legal or financial responsibility, as determined by illogical laws and limited or exemption-ridden contracts. Priorities in Space It was in his discussion of space exploration, however, that Mr Caplan brought out his most progressive cat to set among the legal pigeons. Criticizing the school of legal thought which attached the highest priority to things such as definitions of "sovereignty" and the regime of "space law," he commented "National sovereignty should be left where it is—a creation of the essentially earthbound past: a monument to the horizontal limit of the imagination of statesmen." In this view, as in others, Mr Caplan was well ahead of most members of his audience, but it is to the credit of the Society that its Journal will carry these words, as part of the complete paper, in 1961. But idealism and the future were not all which the speaker had to offer. He cited the IGY, with its scientific co-operation and international consent to satellite launching; and the Antarctic Treaty, in which twelve nations had agreed not to claim sovereignty in that region. The majority of immediate space-law problems were scientific or technical rather than legal, he suggested, and useful work could begin now. Whether or not the Royal Aeronautical Society adopts the Caplan proposal for a law reform committee, whose task would be to apply aeronautical and allied sciences to the evolution of law, its members would do well to recognize and study two points, in particular, from the conclusions to this broad-thinking paper. First, because there has been little direct consultation with scientists in the evolution of law, legal rules often act as a seriously limiting operational factor in aeronautics. Secondly, to avoid this—i.e., to avoid "strangling the future of aeronautics with the noose of ancient thought embodied in our law"—scientists, lawyers and law-makers must find ways to collaborate, both in identifying the important problems and evolving creative solutions. If this collaboration is not achieved the scientific exploration of space itself may be halted, simply because lawyers and politicians have not reached agreement. And aeronautical activity will indeed remain "a blind technological tool of an imperfect civilization."
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