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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 0385.PDF
FLIGHT International, 14 March 1963 367 (T) Straight and Level Q I ENTREAT Rolls-Royce Ltd to re nounce their term "by-pass jet engine." Nobody denies that such engines do by-pass a proportion of their airflow, but this fact seems to me immaterial. Calling an engine by such a name is a throwback to the 1940s, when one spoke of "jet-propulsion units" and "turbine-airscrew engines." Today, thank heaven, terminology is rationalized: turbojet, turbofan, turboprop, turboshaft and turbo-many other things (such as a pump or alternator). The word '"turbofan" appears to stick in the Rolls- Royce gullet, and to do so merely because the company feel it to be vaguely American. Their own appellation is not only clumsy but, in my view, a negative selling factor— and this affects not merely sales of hardware but an airline's sales to the public. BAC, who are Rolls-Royce's best customers for such engines, have chosen to adopt the logical word. I hope Rolls-Royce won't mind my suggestion. They make the best turbofans in the world. • "Britain is planning a 14,000 m.p.h. jet"—BBC TV News. "UK experiments for 12,000 m.p.h. aircraft"—Financial Times. "Plans for a space fighter which will orbit the Earth at more than 10,000 m.p.h." —Daily Herald. "British scientists are working on a 8,000 m.p.h. space plane."—Daily Express. • There is no precedent for Mr John Corbett's private inquiry, on behalf of the Minister of Aviation, into BOAC. There have been inquiries into our airlines before. There was the monumental Parliamentary select committee probe into BOAC and BEA, published in July 1959, and there was the Cadman report published in 1938. The difference in the case of the Corbett report, due to be completed in two or three weeks, is that it will, the Minister says, be con fidential to him. The Minister has got himself into a particularly delicate political position. He is expected to do something about BOAC. He has put off doing this something until he receives Mr Corbett's report, a report which, I suspect, he wishes he had never commissioned. It started in quite a modest way—i.e., "Let's just get a really good accountant, somebody like John Corbett, to give us a second opinion on BOAC's finances." He cannot have foreseen that it would have developed into an inquiry of such far- reaching scope—including management con sultants, the lot. Whereas he and his advisers could, in five minutes, have diagnosed BOAC's ills themselves, he allows ten months to go by—ten months in which the pressures on him to "do something" increase rather than diminish. "Ah, our weather chart, thank you. Bit of cirrus at 35,000ft over Potters Bar, I see- better watch that, eh. By the way, where's our navigator?" "He's under the weather, sir." I hope that whatever he does will not, in consequence, be too politically spectacular. The best thing he can do is to publish the Corbett report, excizing only the bits that are unduly hurtful to third parties or individuals, and publicly declare his con fidence in BOAC, to boost the sagging morale which is what matters more than anything else. He must then turn his mind to freeing BOAC—and BEA—from the political- commercial conflicts that are the reason why this country is not as good at air transport as it could and should be. What precisely do I mean by that? Well, somebody's got to say it sooner or later, and I am going to say it now—assuring you that I feel no particular passion for any party-political creed. Air transport is most successful when (1) it is run on private risk-capital, with the primary object of making money, and when (2) the public interest is safeguarded by an independent air transport authority. I believe that until we release BOAC and BEA from state ownership and the Government interference and subtle persuasion that goes with it, and until we give new terms of reference and teeth to the Air Transport Licensing Board, we shall not be as success ful an air transport nation as we could be. • As a sequel to my piece the other week about the target-towing pilot who, from sheer boredom, wound his cable six times round the Spurn Head Lighthouse, comes this one in the same genre. A Beaufighter pilot was towing a target up and down the Norfolk coast for gun nery practice by Territorial ack ack trainees. Disconcerted at their marksmanship he called up ground control: "Would you mind telling your chaps that I'm pulling this thing, not pushing it ?" • Professor D. T. Jack, chairman of the Air Transport Licensing Board, has been chairman of the tribunal set up to settle the Ford Motor Co dispute. He has also recently accepted the post of chairman of the Railway Staff National Tribunal. A few months ago he acted as arbitrator in a union dispute about who should lay the bricks in South Wales steel furnaces. It would be wrong to suggest that a man who is rightly highly regarded for the impartiality of his industrial arbitration work should not render the occasional public service of this kind. And I don't suppose that these three jobs will demand much more than three or four weeks of his time. But, as full-time chairman of the Air Transport Licensing Board, I am sure he appreciates that the air transport in dustry needs his full-time attention. • A parachute instructor was briefed to be very careful in his psychological approach to young trainees. All went well on a cross country flight until one engine burst into flames, then the other, then the other, then the other. Adjusting his parachute and making his way to the door, he called out: "Now I want you chaps to keep perfectly calm while I go for help." ROGER BACON
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