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Aviation History
1962
1962 - 0712.PDF
710 FLIGHT International, 3 May 1962 Left to right, Mr S. Shehab £/ Din, chief engineer; Capt M. H. Shams, chief pilot and manager of operations; Mr A. El-Moneim Atallah, deputy general manager, commercial; Mr Kama! Eloui, commercial inspector-general UNITED ARAB AIRLINES... given to this Comet customer. John Cunningham, director and chief test pilot of The de Havilland Aircraft Co, has flown several hundred hours with UAA Comet crews since the first aircraft was handed over two years ago—hours which have included everything in the conversion syllabus from touch-and-gos at Cairo to en route flying in UAA uniform. Mr Cunningham's deputy, Mr Peter Bugge, has also put in many hours, in uniform, as a line skipper and check pilot on UAA's Comet services. A senior DH flight engineer, Mr Jimmy Hamilton, has averaged 11 Ohr a month for the past 12 months. On the maintenance side the airline's efforts were summed up by the DH man in these words: "They did their first check 4 them selves in six weeks and when it was finished 1 put the aircraft through the standard three-and-a-half hour production flight test. I could find only 12 snags, and I was hard put to find that many—one of them was that the cockpit windows needed cleaning." You could always judge the quality of an airline, he said, by the sort of equip ment deficiencies that it considered acceptable; it was his experience that deficiencies acceptable to most oparators of the Comet were not acceptable to UAA. For example, the No 3 VHF set had gone U/S that morning and although it would never have been used on the flight to London, a one-and-a-half-hour delay to put it right had been considered worth while. His final comment on the pilots: "You don't find many skippers who take their clearances at Cairo in Arabic, at Rome in Italian, at Frankfurt in German and at London in English." English is the language used throughout the UAA organization. In the classrooms of the airline's technical training centre Egyptian instructors teach new Egyptian engineering recruits physics, maths and so on in English. All the company's regulations and practices are based on those adopted by the British, with whose methods there is a strong technical and, without doubt, general affinity which an Englishman finds agreeable; they talk the same language on the same frequency. Many of the airline's senior executives, most of them pilots, were trained by the RAF. Though politically non-aligned, Egypt has strong ties with British aviation and the On the non-stop flight from Cairo to London: Captains Bassouni and Sodek. Airspeed is 270kt, Mach number 0.76, altitude 33,000ft atmosphere in the Misr Training Centre at Embaba feels far from foreign to a British visitor. The principal of the school, which produces, mostly for UAA, 50 pilots a year with CPLs and 60 licensed ground engineers, is Air Cdre A. H. Digheidi. Formerly head of training in the Egyptian Air Force, he manages a key de partment of the airline. Tremendous emphasis is placed, in line with national policy, on technical training. Under Air Cdre Dig heidi, in charge of the Flying Institute department of the school, is Gp Capt M. S. Hassib, who was trained by the RAF in Egypt at No 4 FTS Abu Sueir, and who took his instructor's course at Upavon and attended the Staff course at Andover in 1949-50. UAA is markedly under-piloted at the moment, there being about 110 on the strength—58 on Comets, 18 on Viscounts and eight on DC-3s. Average flying time, as opposed to duty time, is running at about l,100hr a year, so it can hardly be said that UAA pilots are under-utilized. By the end of 1962 the number of pilots should be up to 160, and utilization down to 800-900hr per pilot, It is odd to come across an airline that is deliberately trying to reduce pilot utilization. The chief pilot and operations manager, Capt M. H. Shams, is the man on whom falls responsibility for all the operational head aches that accompany rapid expansion, a task made a little less daunting by the fine new operations building at the airport into which his department has now moved. When it is finished later this year it will have cost about £lm, including the Redifon Viscount simu lator (which has been in full use for three months), two Link trainers and provision for a big jet simulator with all mod con including visual attachment. Until the Comets came along UAA had no flight engineers, and the 20-odd men required for the Comet fleet were selected from the airline's maintenance establishment. The Comet crew comple ment is two pilots and a specialist flight engineer; UAA's big jets, whatever they are, will be crewed by three pilots and a specialist flight engineer. The airline does not employ navigators, this func tion being performed by the pilot. As Capt Shams says: "You need navigators in ships, but not in modern high-speed aircraft fully equipped with radio and radar aids." All the Comets are being fitted with Bendix Doppler in a programme due to be com pleted by September. Of the specialist flight engineer, Capt Shams says: "If your are a rich company you can afford an engineer at each station down the route. Otherwise you need the specialist who can do the job in flight as well as clearing the snags on the ground." Capt Shams is the man who translates UAA's commercial aspira tions into operational reality. His idea is that the airline should be all-jet as soon as possible. He is geared to introduce big jets early in 1964 and from the technical point of view the Boeing 707-320B. because it has the best payload-range performance, is the most favoured. The 320B, says Capt Shams, "will have the longest range of any jet"—16 per cent better than the standard 320 and better than the DC-8-50 with the four per cent wing. Of the comparative engineering competence of British or American aircraft, Capt Shams says "just the same." He speaks warmly of the Comet and the way it is performing. This year all seven aircraft are being utilized at a rate of 3,200hr, which he considers a good achievement in view of the commercial requirement for an overnight stop at London. Utilization of five Comets during the last few month, has been running at about 2,500hr per aircraft. About four minutes per hour has been saved by the 25kt increase in cruising speed; this has been made possible by an increase in Mach number from 0.76 to 0.79, r.p.m. being raised from 7,050 to 7,120. The modification involves no changes to the aircraft other than recalibration of the
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