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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1198.PDF
they showed a loss of £2m. How much provision, if any, was made in these costs for the operation of thenational airways system and the associated services is unknown. The United States budget for the FAA in 1963 is £270m, of which £120m represents the estimated cost of the civil element of airways operation. It is anyone's guess just how much their airports cost annually for operation, depreciation and amortization of capital. A few are adept enough to make a profit; but Dulles International, which has only just started operating, has cost about £38£m to date; Chicago/O'Hare has spent £53m and is planned to go up to £68m; while Los Angeles has already cost about £59m. Everything in the line of airport equipment seems to cost the earth. For example, the mobile lounges which are one of the show features of Dulles International cost £92,000 each. Twenty are in use at present, and the plans call for the addition of a further six or seven. Adding such costs as we have, it seems that between them the USA, Britain and Canada have spent, or are committed to spend, £334|m. Accepting the guesstimate of £78m for IATA's payments as being reasonably close and bearing in mind that Canada (whose landing charges are considerably above the average) manages only to recover 10 per cent of her outlay, it seems probable that the free world is spending between £800 and £900m annually on the pro vision of airports and facilities, with every likelihood of being called on for more still. Against this the LATA contribution of £78m looks very paltry and something needs to be done about it. IATA will say that they cannot afford to pay any more, and in view of their present financial state this is probably true; but they have contributed to their own financial difficulties by allowing a surfeit of seats to wait for a shortage of passengers and then appear ing to fall over themselves in competing to see who can lose the most money. This is ridiculous, and it is equally ridiculous for govern ments to recover only a pittance of the amount which they spend on aeronautical facilities and then find that they have to subsidize their national airlines into the bargain. It is an inescapable fact that the money which is being spent is found from somewhere and, as only about 10 per cent of it is com ing from the airline industry, the balance must be coming from every one of us in some way or another. Generally this is through the medium of routine taxation not specifically earmarked for aviation. A certain amount comes from passenger-services charges, which are now being adopted by more and more countries. Such charges are a positive irritant to most people. By the time they have paid off their taxi, or paid the airline 'bus fare, or mortgaged their souls to park their cars, they are in no mood to relish paying even a small sum under the guise of a passenger service charge. The sums collected through general taxation to subsidize aviation are inequitable. The truly wealthy pay so much that they have no idea what they are paying for, though they can afford to hire accoun tants to ensure that they pay only as much as they have to. The middle-income groups can probably afford to pay their fair share; but taxpayers in the lower income brackets, who may not even be able to afford air travel, still have to contribute towards it—which is manifestly unfair. It is also unfair to extract it from those who have no wish to use air travel. The only equitable system would be to stop treating air travel as a social service and get the missing millions from it either by increasing the fares or by imposing a direct government tax on all tickets sold. France charges 2.50NF on every ticket sold, in addition to levying a passenger service charge; Spain charges 5 per cent on all internal flights, and so does Japan, whilst the USA imposes a transport ation tax of 5 per cent on all tickets. There is no real reason why other countries should not follow suit, provided that all the amounts collected are allocated specificially to aviation and not poured into an anonymous general fund. Such a device would allow the air lines to preserve the fiction of cheaper fares by which they set so much store and revenue would bear a distinct relation to traffic— which does not happen now: the landing fee at London is the same whether the aircraft is full or empty. The avowed aim of the airlines is to reduce fares in order to reach a vast and as yet untapped market. They argue that increased FLIGHT International, 4 July 1963 fares, whether imposed by themselves or augmented by ticket surcharges, would drive away traffic, I do not believe them, nor do I beiieve in the existence of their mythical market. The market is already saturated, and the only sensible thing for the airline industry to do is to pause for a while and let the faltering steps of human progress catch up with it. Where people are concerned there is a natural rhythm to their rate of progress and trying to speed it up artificially is like trying to hurry gestation—it doesn't work too well. • * • In the preparation of the tables I am greatly indebted to the Aeronautical Information Service of the Ministry of Aviation for providing the up-to-the-minute information which was not avail able from the latest ICAO Manual of Airport Tariffs. (This book is more out of date than ever and has now become a pitfall for young players. According to it the Turkish charges are ten times what they really are.) I am also very grateful to Shell for providing details of fuel taxes and charges. Thanks are due, too, to the kind friend who lent me an adding machine that has been of inval uable assistance in wrestling with the 6,000 calculations which preparing and checking the tables demanded. In a later issue the data in the tables will be analysed in such a manner that accurate comparisons may be drawn between those countries which run at a heavy loss and those which manage to extract adequate (or in some cases extortionate) revenue from civil aviation. One seeming paradox has already emerged from the analysis. The average landing fee for a Boeing 707, among the 42 countries, is £90 lis so that by charging £241 16s London ranks second from the top. Yet in the amount which it extracts from the airline it ranks only 28th. Even stranger is the fact that this average landing fee represents less than 15 per cent of the potential revenue for all the countries combined. GUILD OF AIR PILOTS' AWARDS THE ANNUAL AWARDS of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators for 1962 are to go to three men who have made major contributions to aircraft design and safety and to a Royal Air Force squadron that is distinguished for its record of air rescue. The men are Wg Cdr D. F. H. Grocott, AFC, Senior Experimental Navigation Officer at the RAF College of Air Warfare, Manby; Mr D. P. Davies, OBE, DSC, chief test pilot to the Air Registration Board; and Mr H. C. H. Merewether, as deputy chief test pilot to Hawker Aircraft. The RAF unit is No 22 (Search and Rescue) Sqn. Wg Cdr Grocott is to receive the Johnston Memorial Trophy, for the best feat of air navigation. He has evolved, says the Guild, precise flight techniques for determining the basic accuracies of high-accuracy navigational systems. These have been used during the development of FM/CW Doppler equipments; in evaluating the Ground Position Indicator Mk 6; in determining the heading securities obtainable from a fixed monitored azimuth technique that will have application in trial launchings of inertially guided stand-off missiles; and, latterly, for the flight trials of an aircraft- borne inertial navigation platform. Mr Davies receives the Cumberbatch Trophy. As chief test pilot and head of the flight-test section of the ARB, he has flight- tested 86 different types and conducted acceptance test flights on most of the major aircraft in British operation. "This very wide experience," says the Guild, "enables him more than any other pilot to influence designers in the direction of improving new types of modern transport aeroplanes." Mr Merewether, who is awarded the Derry and Richards Me morial Medal made—again we quote the Guild—"a valuable contribution to the development flying of the Hunter and, more recently, the Hawker P.1127. His work on spinning the Hunter, particularly inverted, has contributed greatly to knowledge on the spinning characteristics of swept-wing aircraft." Mr Merewether's handling of a P. 1127 after an engine-cut is also highly praised. The Commanding Officer and crews of No 22 Sqn win the Brack- ley Memorial Trophy for outstanding flying contributions to the operational development of air transport. The squadron is respon sible for the maintenance of short-range search and rescue facilities in southern and western coastal areas of the United Kingdom, but today the activities of its helicopters cover almost every form of emergency, both military and civil, over land and sea.
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