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Aviation History
1962
1962 - 0049.PDF
FLIGHT International, 11 January 1962 RATIONALIZE AND FORGET? 49 types at the right time without the stimulus of an official specifica tion or customer requirement. In an industry that tends to an unhealthy bias towards sheer gargantuan size in the units into which it has been reshaped, with overheads that make it impracticable to tackle smaller, more saleable projects, the small and independent firm can exert a wholly beneficial influence. The Beagle B.206 can be regarded as inheriting the Spitfire and Mosquito tradition, for although entirely unwarlike in purpose it represents, like those two famous military types, the fulfilment of a need which was never exactly envisaged by the official specification writers and which a Government department would have ignored. The ground-effect vehicle, too. may one day come to fill a real need and the diversity of projects in this country now under way, besides playing an important part in making use of such essential skills as aerodynamics and light-alloy fabrication, also serves to illustrate the pace at which private enterprise can move. Neverthe less, it is ironical that the British aircraft industry should currently be devoting so much attention to this new conception; and it cannot be denied that the new dynamic that the industry was led to expect would follow rationalization and the creation of a Ministry of Aviation has simply not materialized. President Kennedy this March asked Mr N. E. Halaby, Adminis trator of the FAA, "to develop for my consideration a statement of national aviation goals for the period between now and 1970" and the resulting report, entitled "Project Horizon" and compiled with characteristic American zest and enthusiasm by a Task Force. was on the President's desk early in September. The French, too, are certainly no sluggards in aviation policy making, as is proved by the Super Caravelle project and the Loi Programme which sets out the design and production effort needed to meet national military requirements for all three Services from 1959 to 1964, in particular the French nuclear deterrent. In this programme, about £30.7m is set aside for the purchase of aircraft, and some £36.75m for nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them. Supplementing this military programme is "Operation Caravelle," involving about 200 firms all working together on the production of France's medium jet airliner —an object-lesson in co-operation between nationalized and privately-owned segments of the French industry The Worst in Europe? The overwhelming impression left by "Project Horizon" and France's efforts is a sense of mission, of pace, of urgency and of wholehearted Government backing that is totally lacking in this country. By contrast, there always seems to be something faintly ridiculous about the way the British political mind lumbers towards the solution of our aviation problems; in so doing it resembles nothing so much as an Edwardian country gentleman catching his first glimpse of a horseless carriage and prodding at the strange beast with his walking-stick. This may not seem such an unduly exasperated assessment when it is realized The Beagle B.206 is a worthy challenger to the traditional US dominance in executive light twins The VTOL combat aeroplane, exemplified here by the Hawker P.I 127, has brought a new lease of life to the manned military aircraft that no major development contract for military aircraft or missiles has been placed since rationalization and that the two major groups have had to make representations to the Minister to secure future work—only to be repulsed, if reports are correct. Two years after the Ministry of Aviation was formed, and 16 years after the end of the war, we are still ignorant of what, if any, "national aviation goals" this country is supposed to be shooting for, and the industry feels, rightly or wrongly, badly let down over what is widely felt to be the Government's failure to fulfil its promises over rationalization. Is Rationalize and Forget the Government's only solution? A Minister of Aviation who ap parently cannot formulate an aviation policy cuts as odd a figure as a Chancellor who cannot produce a Budget. Inability to formu late a national aviation policy might have been tolerated as one of the penalties of the old MTCA/Ministry of Supply regime, but it can no longer be regarded as satisfactory now that there is a separate Ministry at Cabinet level responsible for the whole of British aviation. British aviation planning and policy-making at Ministerial level is—and has been since 1955—probably the worst in Europe. This is not the sort of assertion that one cares to make in print without due consideration; but nevertheless the writer believes it to be true, and for a number of reasons. The most basic of these is a failure to obtain what in military parlance is called a proper appreciation of the situation; as a very witty Fre ich writer has observed, in England, intelligence is more appreciated as a branch of the Services than as a quality. Certainly a peculiar disadvantage of the British aircraft industry has been a basic lack of Ministerial interest, even a basic lack of sympathy with its achievements, aims, hopes and fears. Again, this might have been accepted with good grace as a natural by-product of the MTCA/Ministry of Supply regime with its division of authority and preaccupation of the Ministers concerned with a host of non-aeronautical matters; but in a Ministry devoted (if that is the right word) entirely to aviation, it is less than satisfactory. It may be argued that the Government is currently spending some £200m annually on the aircraft industry, and that such a level of expenditure hardly denotes lack of interest. Yet this is just what it cost the taxpayer to subsidize the farmers in 1954, and the Government then described this bill as "very high." And the Minister of Agriculture recently had to present Parliament with a bill for an e>tra £78m in farm subsidies which will T\ON total an estimated £345m for the current financial year—enough monev to develop a Mach 3 airliner if this country so deiired. It can hardly be argued that the aircrart industry is re eivinj a disproportionate anount of public expenditure; in I960 Frerch f overnment spend ing on its aircraft industry totalled £113m, about half the current British total, although the French industry's present work-force is only about one-third as great as this country's. Rationalize and Forget? It is not necessarily massive public expenditure on new orders that is necessary, especially if the latter are to be regarded as bait in the stick-and-carrot game to force the industry into further regroupings. A nev dynamic is needed, of the kind that is already inspiring France and America. The pre-Comet attitudes of mind which saw the industry's function as producing aircraft as unique technically (and, because they were unique, as saleable) as the Comet, Viscount and Britannia were a decade ago must be replaced. In their place must come the realization that such advances as the VTOL combat aircraft and the supersonic airliner cannot be developed, as the turbine airliner was, more or less at our leisure; they must be tackled contemporaneously with and in competition with other nations working on the same lines. Today's
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