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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0631.PDF
HT, 11 May 1961 641 Straight and Level T^HERE, in his accustomed cornerin the Air Power Club smokingroom, was my old friend Sir Charles Boost, chairman of Plummet \v Lines. He was looking fit, after his annual tour of Plummet's far-flung nenvork of international routes, a trip ne makes each year in his famous yacht Supersonic Brochure. :"Ah, laddie, let me get you a drink," said, dismissing his press officer :.n a curt nod. "Just the chap I wanted to see! What do you think of this, eh?" Out of a secret drawer in his flying helmet he produced the biggest political pamphlet I have ever seen, entitled Drains to the Corporations. "It's only a draft,- but it"ll give you an idea of how we intend to persuade the Air Transport Licensing Board to grant our six hundred-odd applications for new route licences. Have another drink." The document was so lengthy that J had to ask the barman for the use of BEDSTEAD*, the Club's reading simu- lator, a recent gift from Thinx Elec- tronics Ltd. In a flash Bedstead pro- duced a summary for me: "BEA and BOAC are dogs in the manager, flabby, fat, inefficient, subsidized, useless, hope- less, terrible, ghastly and lousy; more- over their stewardesses are frightful compared with Plummet's, though the nicest one of all works for British United Airways. Therefore, all BOAC and BEA routes should at once be * Busy Executives' Device for SiftingEndless Aviation Documents. shared with Plummet. As a concession on its part, Plummet will agree to a pool agreement with BOAC and BEA, in order to defeat the whole object of the Civil Aviation Licensing Act, 1960." "How about that, eh, laddie? Good stuff? Smack in the Minister's cake- hole, eh? Have another drink." • PONY EXPRESS ATTACKED BY NUCLEAR SUB —heading to Admiralty news release. You never quite know just where these things are going to pop up, whether from under the ice-cap or in the middle of cowboy country. In this case, USS Sargo was doing battle with SEATO forces in a Far East exercise called "Pony Express." It's really wonderful what warships will do these days. I like this from a Daily Express story about the aircraft carrier HMS Hermes:— "Hermes, with 190 officers and 1,644 men.has a summer programme to carry out before her refit. She will attend the Paris Air Show,and then return to Portsmouth." • "Under the new regime the 'postural, strategic and tactical value'' of a given weapons system will come in for closer scrutiny than previously."—US Depart- ment of Defense. As you know, Straight and Level has a posture—especially in relation to the Americans' obsession with the word posture. Now they put it in adjectival form—postural. Watch out, folks, for the verb form, slated for expedited rollout—posturalize. Then for the noun, posturalization, followed by the adjective posturalizational, and then the verb posturalizationalize. • "The giant Amalgamated Engineer- ing Union yesterday claimed . . . reduc- tion from 42 to 40 hours in the working week, without loss of pay."—Daily Mail, London, April 27. "Latest signs of a growing impatience with the relative US position in space exploration includes agitation ... for a longer work week—44hr at first, and later 48hr."—Aviation Week, New York, April 24. • It strikes me as high time that the people engaged in the space-race agreed on a system for calculating payloads. Both the US and Soviet Union have / hope the Minister of Defence, Mr Harold Watkinson, will not think me too disrespectful for showing you this picture of him at a press conference. He was actually talking about Skybolt, and when you talk about Skybolt the calendar is one of those things you've very much got to take into account "Big clubhouse they've got here, Fred" given detailed figures for weights placed in orbit, but have carefully failed to explain what these weights mean. Saturn, for example, by far the most capable launcher in prospect in America, is said to be designed to put 20,0001b into low Earth orbit, and accelerate a 6,0001b payload to escape velocity. But do these weights include structure, final-stage propulsion and residual fuel ? The Russians have been very careful to say exactly how they define their pay- load weight, and an internationally understood system is overdue. How odd if the payload quoted for an airliner might, or might not, include the weight of the fuselage. 0 Do you remember my quotation the other week, which I attributed to Benjamin Franklin: "Of what use is a new-born babe?" The Editor tells me it was Faraday, and would I please be not quite so ill-read in future. • BEA and their associates in the Mediterranean and Middle East, Cyprus Airways and Olympic Airways, are jointly advertising in Beirut that their Comets are "THE FASTEST COMETS IN THE WORLD." Faster than the Comets operated by BOAC and their associates, MEA, that means. Faster because they were de- signed for shorter hauls. Thinks: What are BEA doing competing with BOAC Comets anyway ? Don't Miss This • From a radio propagation con- ference programme at Boulder, Colo- rado, July 31-August 18: "August 7-18 session, Paper 22: Auroral and Quasi- Incoherent (Thompson) Scattering, by R. S. Cohen." ROGER BACON
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