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Aviation History
1961
1961 - 1029.PDF
FLIGHT, 27 July 1961 131 Seen at Lod Airport, Tel Aviv, this El Al Boeing 707 crew had just set up a new record for the New York - Te/ Aviv route, the longest scheduled non-stop run of any airline in the world. Captain Tom Jones, El Al's superintendent of flight operations, who captained the flight, is fourth from the right BRITAIN'S BILATERAL AGREEMENTS IN recent years the bilateral-agreement negotiators in the Ministryof Aviation have left largely to BEA and BOAC the job ofstriking better bargains for British air transport. The corporations have done this by negotiating pooling agreements—agreementswhich (despite what BEA told the Air Transport Licensing Board recently) the Ministry does not even see. If the Licensing Board does decide to grant independentlicences, hard political bargaining lies ahead, and the Ministry must accept responsibility for the powers that it claims, and whichwere denied the Board. There would be cause for disquiet even if the Ministry does sit up,switch off the corporations' pooling autopilots, and take over the controls. The Ministry has a vested interest in BOAC and BEA,so it need not try hard to win for the independents the traffic rights that are needed to consummate any licence that the Board maygrant. The Ministry's power over traffic rights, which we wanted the Board to share, can make a mockery of the whole licensingsystem. Somebody must draw attention to the muddle that exists, andthat body is the Board. The case law that the Board uttered when it granted Cunard Eagle's Atlantic licence was excellent—particu-larly in its disposal of that abstract art form "material diversion." Let it next draw attention to the need for the Minister to pull uphis bilateral socks. The Minister will not be cross; his predecessor is on record as having said that the Board is independent. Thisbeing so, the Board can say what it thinks. And if it thinks—as it surely must if it decides to grant any independent licence—thatbilaterals can be used to defeat the Board's purpose, it must say so, in public. BOAC 1960-61 TODAY, July 27, Sir Matthew Slattery, chairman of BOAC,is due to present the corporation's report and accounts forthe year ending March 31, 1961, a year which is expected to show a loss of about £1.7m. On operations alone, provisional figures issuedin May showed a record operating profit of some £4|m, but interest payments reduced this to only about £100,000 and the losses ofBOAC Associated Companies were up by about £700,000 to £1.8m. Big increases in capacity, especially on the western routes, com-bined with a shortfall in traffic on western routes, caused a drop in load factor of two percentage points to 55.5. A total of 790,718passengers was carried on all services by BOAC. We hope to publish reviews of the report and accounts in subsequent issues. TO HEAR THE APPEAL IN answer to a question from Mr Chetwynd, Mr Geoffrey Rippon.PPS to the Minister of Aviation, revealed in the Commons last week that Sir Fred Pritchard, a retired High Court judge, hasconsented to hear BOAC's appeal against the licensing of Cunard Eagle on the North Atlantic route. "Under the procedural rules theappeal cannot be heard before the middle of August," said Mr Rippon. "A date will be fixed which is convenient to the commis-sioner and to the parties, but it may not be heard until the beginning of September. The appeal will be heard in public." INCLUSIVE-TOUR MARATHON WHATEVER else might be said about the Air TransportLicensing Board, it cannot be charged with any lack of what Sir Miles Thomas used to call speed-of-decision. The speed withwhich the North Atlantic Service Case (as the CAB would have called it) was decided compares with the time taken over some ofthe CAB's own route and fare cases: A\ years for the General Passenger Fare Investigation, to take an extreme example, and threeyears for the Domestic Cargo-Mail Service Case, which is still to be decided. Now, faced with a truly daunting volume of inclusive tourapplications for the 1962 summer, the Board has got its IT hearing organized to a high degree, even to specifying where applicants andobjectors should sit. These IT applications will begin to be heard on Tuesday, August15, continuing until Friday, August 18; thereafter hearings will probably be held on four days of each week, usually Monday toThursday. As with the recent winter IT hearings, the Board will sit in two panels, one meeting in the mornings and the other in theafternoons. The procedure of application, objection and cross- examination has also been outlined in detail in Civil AviationLicensing Notice No 31. THE STRIKERS GO BACK THE fortnight-old unofficial strike of BOAC maintenance menended on July 20 when strikers voted to resume work. Thiswas only two days after a mass meeting had decided to reject a five-point proposal from the National Joint Council for Civil AirTransport for settlement of the strike; among the points was an unqualified BOAC undertaking that no one would be adverselyaffected by the reorganization of the supervisory grades. The strikers agreed to go back on the terms rejected at the previous massmeeting, and a six-man committee will now investigate their complaints about the operation of BOAC's new supervisory schemealready introduced in some of the corporation's shops. The sudden change of heart which ended the strike was, it seems,based on the prospect of a Ministry of Labour court of enquiry into the strike, similar to Professor Jack's enquiry into the Comet strikenearly three years ago. None of the strike leaders wanted this, because it seems to be the general opinion that Government-appointed courts of inquiry "always throw mud on the trade union movement.'" The strike, which has cost BOAC an estimated £1.5m,was characterized by inter-union rivalry; Sir Matthew Slattery, in an interview with the Daily Mail, described the strike as a disputebetween the ETU and ASSET (the Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians). "ASSET has got a certainamount of kudos from its members, having been regraded with an extra 42s or so a week. This has increased ASSET'S prestige," saidSir Matthew. "The ETU is upset—particularly as when its men are promoted to supervisory jobs they tend to go over to ASSET. Oneunion leader said last week they regarded ASSET as interlopers." BOAC itself was criticized by Mr Jim Matthews, national industrialofficer of the general and municipal workers, for its handling of the dispute; "The corporation has been among the most ham-handedemployers I have ever met on this issue. Mind you, I think some of our own people are ham-handed as well." The supervisory scheme that caused all the trouble was the laststage in the reorganization of the engineering department, which has been going on for two years or more. ACCIDENTS POSTSCRIPT T^OLLOWING the crash-landing of a United DC-8 at Denver onX July 11, and an incident on the following day in which an Eastern DC-8 swung off the runway on landing at Miami and blewout all the main undercarriage tyres, the FAA sent a telegram to all DC-8 operators announcing changes in the procedure foremergency operation of the DC-8 hydraulic system. This requires the pilot to conserve as much hydraulic accumulator pressure aspossible during emergency free-fall lowering of the landing gear. The FAA also draws attention to the possibility of an inadvertentopening of the DC-8's thrust reversers after the pilot has selected reverse; this could lead to loss of control. Ceteka, the official Czech news agency, has issued an unusuallyfrank statement on the CSA 11-18 crash near Casablanca: "Legiti- mate surprise has been aroused by the fact that two aircraft of theCzechoslovak Airlines, which have proven their reliability on many air routes throughout the world, crashed within the short period offour months on the route between Prague and Bamako, on which many difficulties had to be overcome from its very inception." It is not clear from this whether the "difficulties" are diplomatic(i.e., traffic rights) or operational; but by linking the CSA 11-18 crash near Nuremberg with that at Casablanca, the official state-ment implies that the causes of both accidents had something in common. The Nuremberg disaster was due to some sort of in-flight explosion (the Czech news agency has hinted at the possibility of sabotage), while the Casablanca crash seems to have been causedat least partly by unfamiliarity with the alternates.
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