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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0154.PDF
154 FLIGHT, 3 February Straight and Level WHAT'S this? A man with a civilaviation background and experi-ence as a pilot appointed by the Minister of Aviation as chairman of theWelsh Advisory Committee for Civil Aviation? Pass me the smelling salts. Doesn't the Minister realize that SirMiles Thomas will, as chairman of BOAC from 1949 until 1956, know whathe's talking about? Excuse me—an- other whiff. Ah, that's better. Goodness gracious! What's this Another man with a civil aviation background and expereince as a pilotappointed chairman of the Northern Ireland Advisory Committee for CivilAviation? Not Wg Cdr R. C. Preston! But won't he know what he's talkingabout, too? I must just have a little lie down.Shock, you know. I'll be all right in a minute. • Extract from Hansard, January 24: MR WYATT: "Does not the Prime Minister think that it is a crazy idea tohave the Minister for Science at home pouring scorn on the practicability of aBritish space programme and the Minister of Aviation touring abroadtrying to persuade other countries what a good idea it is? "Would it not be much more sensibleto have one Minister in charge instead of two Ministers taking different lines,and getting on with the job of providing a British communications satellite sys-tem which we could make a great deal of money with? • A letter in The Guardian: "Sir—On a BEA midweek night plane to Madrid (where there is a price- ring) a one-year return ticket costs me £52 17s Od. If I stay in the same plane 600 miles farther to Gibraltar and back (where there is competition with pri- vate enterprise) the fare drops to £30 10s Od. "One Minister appoints a Commis- sion which roundly condemns price- rings. Another appoints a Board which adheres to a ring more blatant than any of them.—Yours, etc." • In his final "State of the Union"message, delivered on January 12, Presi- dent Eisenhower said: — "Not until 1953 were expenditureson long-range ballistic missiles pro- grammes even as much as $1,000,000 ayear. "Today we spend ten times as mucheach day on these programmes as was spent in all of 1952." iff/m), It* m«(m« Him,ANTIQU AIRPLANI This is the cover of an American publication which has just come my way and which has set my Flight colleagues drooling. It was nice of the publishers* to feature the Shuttleworth 504 so prominently—even if the caption does read: "Air-borne is the Avro trainer, a popular World ¥ar I plane." But it is full of interest for enthusiasts (including nitpickers) and for admirers of lovely pictures • I have read Sir Percy Hunting's paper The World's Future Air Trans- port Requirements, which he presented last week to the Institution of Produc- tion Engineers as the 1961 Lord Sempill paper. It is competent, commendable *Sharon Publishing Corp. Division Street, Derby, Conn, USA. Price 75 cents. Last week I said that if there is one thing that is always getting in the way of aviation it's trees. But there is another—birds. Man has tried every- thing to rid airports of birds, from ampli- fied recordings of their warning cries to less sophisticated techniques involving fire and dynamite. Here is a Bell telling seagulls to SHOO from Miami Airport. Thev didn't stuff, marred only by the inclusion o; anumber of what I call OK expressio s. For example: discipline (= methoi),SST (= supersonic transport), viable (= acceptable), lean (= economical).And R. Bacon, defender of our English aeronautical mother tongue, confessesto a little wince or two at some Ameri- canisms in the paper. For exampie:obsoleting, envisioned, peppercorn rentals, fiscal, transportation, airline in-ventories, chewed up, and one or two others which I am sure Sir Percydoesn't normally use. One aspect of this paper that caughtthe newspaper headlines is the sugges- tion that, for shorter journeys of thefuture, the airlines might carry a pro- portion of standing passengers. As I seeit, the limiting factor on the number of passengers in a cabin is not cabin venti-lation, as Sir Percy suggests (albeit lightheartedly), but safety. A word or two with the ARB aboutthe number of available emergency exits might, I think, be necessary—because it is this which puts the limit on passenger density. It doesn't matterabout breathing. At least not if my experience of the 6 p.m. London Trans-port Underground discipline is viable. • It is always rather smart to deny something which one's opponent never in fact actually said. Thus Sir William Hildred of IATA, in his recent reply to Lord Brabazon's arguments about the relative safety of JP.4 and kerosine, declared that JP.4 "is neither new nor highly explosive." One result of this statement was a report in an American paper that Lord Brabazon "charged on a television program that major airlines were 'hushing up' their use of JPA, a gasoline /kerosine mixture which he de- scribed as new and 'highly explosive.'" Of course, Lord Brabazon never said any of these things. But now lots of people who have never actually heard him think that he did say them. • Collectors of curious facts should know that Silver City are flying a quarter of a million fresh eggs to Guernsey every month. The Guemscy- man who imports the eggs says: "We seldom get more than half a dozen cracked eggs on weekly shipments of some 60,000." You won't believe it, but his name is Mr Hamon. And, if you can bear it, Silver City last week put out a news release on the subject entitled "EGGSELLENT ENTER- PRISE." The release appeared on my desk with a note in the imperious hand of the Editor: "This one for Bacon." • "If you listened to the ARB, old boy, you'd use an iron bar to hang your ties on."—heard after Mr Le Sueur's lecture (page 144). ROGER BACON
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