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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 0887.PDF
FLIGHT, 29 June 1961 899 (T) Straight and Level THE other day BBC Televisioninterviewed Dr Richard Beechingof British Railways. The interview was wide-ranging enough for discussion of all sorts of railway problems, including road competition. But there was no mention of air competition, and the effect that this will have and is already having on British Railways' high revenue trunk route services. If only somebody in British Railways would just say that they are aware of the very real possibility that, as has hap- pened in the USA, mounting air competition may eventually kill the railways' long-haul passenger business. It worried me last year that a Parlia- mentary select committee could expend goodness knows how many words and hours investigating the future of British Railways, into which hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money is being poured, without looking into the effects of air competition. It is just as worrying that nobody in British Railways seems to know what their traffic is on trunk routes such as those from London to Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Belfast. The only railway- man who seems to be awake is the Editor of Trains Illustrated, who in his June issue has an article called "In the Shadow of the Vanguard." In it he offers some very uncomplacent thoughts about the menace of air competition. British Railways can't beat the air, so they ought to join it. I look forward to hearing that they are thinking along these lines. • At the Pathfinder Association dinner Arnold Field, who is Master of the Guild of Air Traffic Control Officers, told a colleague that when an aircraft called London Approach the service given was the same whether the recipient was a Boeing 707 or Flight's Gemini. The same colleague had an opportunity of putting this to the test on June 18, when in a hurry to get from Fair Oaks to Elstree before the airfield was closed "And now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the Derbysaurus, or, more correctly, Ouselum. Generically named after the River Ouse, and a habitant of the area bounded by the Tyne, Conway and Spey, it differs from the Lesser American Tailsitter in being, both in appear- ance and in natural aptitude, a bed-sitter. Its offspring, as you will be aware, ladies and gentlemen, move in ever-increasing circles, eventually disappearing vertic- ally into their flight envelopes" to visiting aircraft during the display there. He called London Approach on 119.2 after getting airborne on a westerly heading, to ask for VMC clearance. After telling him to stand by for a few moments they asked him to steer 090 and to reduce height to 1,000ft. After a few minutes of this heading he was given 050 to steer, which took him up towards the southern boundary of LAP. He was then vectored on to 030, told when he was two miles east of Northolt ("which has no traffic at the moment"), then informed he was on a heading for Elstree. As a result, the trip took him only 20min instead of half an hour more round the zone. Thanks, London Approach. • Aeronautically, the name of Hodgson is primarily connected with the Hodgson-Cuthbertson collection (of what I suppose the bibliophiles and collectors know as aeronautieand) in the keeping of the Royal Aeronautical Society. It is further associated with one of the most scholarly and finely produced of all books on aviation— "It dotsn't matter where I am, or what I'm wearing, I do^ like my nails to look nice." (Astronaut Cdr Alan Shepard undergoing survival training some months ago) The History of Aeronautics in Great Britain by J. E. Hodgson, published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies in 1924 and today a coveted collectors' item. Yet another association with flying— and I am still speaking of the same family—is with C. R. ("Blick") Hodgson of our own publishing house and who is in the air with Flight's Gemini when- ever he can get his hands on it. But the same family has long been better known still in the rare-book world, in connection with Hodgson & Co, "Auctioneers of Libraries and Rare Books, MSS., Autographs and Engrav- ings." The first four volumes of Flight went under the hammer at their Chancery Lane salerooms recently and realized £34. I find that the individual issues would have cost a contemporary reader 19s 2d—in steady pennies and three- halfpences. What offers for an auto- graphed copy of the first edition of Straight and Level ? • Did you notice how cunningly the Top Security Chiefs threw secret agents off the scent by tampering with the drawing of an integrated anti-icing and boundary-layer control system of a Certain Aircraft on page 852 of Flight last week? Alas, the treacherous dog who wrote the caption came near to wrecking their master plan by blabbing that the system was apparently that used on the Buccaneer. (Message for MI5: I saw the Soviet assistant air attache in the technical editor's office the other day.) • " We shall be late arriving at London Airport because we were late leaving Orly." Quote from BEA captain in his hello-to- passengers message on a recent Paris (Orly) - London flight. ROGER BACON
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