FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1963
1963 - 1199.PDF
FLIGHT International, 4 July 1963 25 Letters The Editor of" Flight International" is not necessarily in agreement with the views expressed by correspondents in these columns. Names and addresses of writers, not for publication in detail, must in all cases accompany letters. Brief letters will have a better chance of early publication. Concord Discord? SIR,—As an addition to Roger Bacon's justifiably irate reply to Mr Tom Margerison in The Sunday Times Flight Inter national, June 20), not only is it ridiculous for Mr Margerison to say that the "Super Caravelle," so-called, is a French design, for the reasons Roger Bacon stated; but I was recently in the main hangars of the Bristol Aircraft division of BAC at Filton and saw an 80ft mock-up of the Con- cord(e), and was informed that it is based, roughly 70 per cent, on the Bristol 198 design! From outward appearance, the design seems almost 100 per cent Bristol. Also, all the design of the modified FD.2 (Bristol 221) is wholly Bristol. This aircraft is due to commence engine runs in two months or so. So, Mr Margerison and M Satre, it's a good thing that Britain is 50-50 with France on the Concord(e), isn't it? Bristol CHRISTOPHER G. HOUSE No Fanfare for the Customs? SIR,—Cfeie thing that struck me as depressing in reading "Fanfare for the Fortress" (June 20) was the news that two of the B-17s were broken up. I had heard that the main reason for not retaining them in the UK for future exhibition was that HM Customs demanded £40,000 duty (whether on the pair or per aircraft I know not). This strikes me as a fantastic amount. Could not some "ban on re-sale" clause allow such machines to remain here so that air-minded youngsters may see Second World War types ? Leigh-on-Sea, Essex LESLIE HUNT Our Own Nest SIR,—I am only a guest member of this club [see overleaf], but the opportunity to use such a James Bond type of dateline was too good to miss. To begin to explain the title of this letter, I should say that I work for a British aircraft company, and that my work has taken me on a fairly long journey. I left England for the United States nearly a month ago and proceeded to Australia via Honolulu. Last week I came on to Tokyo by way of Hong Kong. My job is public relations and I have been travelling in support of my colleagues in the sales and engineering departments. We believe—obviously, I suppose —that we have a good product to sell all round the world, and we have been trying to tell our story as well as possible. My company has sales teams in action all the time and has been conducting a major sales effort abroad for several years. Our usual approach is to attempt to sell our aeroplanes on technical and economic grounds. It is quite difficult to visualize any other basis for a sales effort. One must assume that most airlines have an idea of the type of equip ment they are seeking, so once the requirement is known sales should depend on showing the airline, to the best of your ability, that your equipment meets their requirements. However unpalatable the idea may be, especially perhaps to honest British engineers, the awful word "image" must also be considered. Consider a British aircraft sales team arriving on an overseas airline's doorstep: the potential customer already has [a mental image of the country, the company and the product represented by the sales team. This image is made up of many notions—some true, some false, some half-true. One thing is certain: no aircraft industry is as fully and continuously projected abroad as Britain's, The customer's ideas about the British product are inevitably influenced by what he reads about it in the Press, technical and otherwise. Of the world's four major aircraft-manufacturing nations, only Britain has a national Press. London is the centre not only of our national Press, but also of overseas correspondents from virtually every other country. These correspondents have a big parish to cover and they naturally pick up some of their news "leads" from the British Press. Consequently any tit-bit from Hatfield or Weybridge is liable to be relayed within a day or two to Little Rock, Adelaide, Ndola, Rome or Manila. This chain of com munication tends not to work in reverse, nor is it paralleled. In the last few weeks I have been seeing at first hand some of the results of the global public address system which reports on British affairs. At this stage it is only proper for me to declare an interest in the VC10 aircraft which, as the world knows, recently encountered drag problems during development flying. Ideally, an aircraft manufacturer would prefer not to discuss problems which only he can solve until he has solved them. But it is not an ideal world; our problem was becoming widely known, and we decided last March that the only reasonable course of action was to admit the problem openly, outline the steps we were taking to solve it, and promise factual information on results when we had any to offer. I left England just as our technical people were beginning to see daylight, but before it was possible to announce firmly that we had overcome the problem. A few days earlier, a British national newspaper had published a front page story to the effect that the VC10 was in even worse trouble than the manufacturers had admitted. The story had been refuted officially and immediately by the manu facturers, but I leave you to guess which statement was picked up and repeated in, say, a Melbourne paper. It was during my visit to Australia that the Minister of Aviation stated in the House of Commons that the VC10 drag problem had been overcome; I learned from colleagues by cable that this statement had been made, and sub sequently we re-circulated the statement locally, but I did not see it published. This is not said complainingly: good news is no news, and there is no reason to expect overseas newspapers to report that a British aircraft manufacturer's problem has been overcome. It could be argued that, in the case of Australia, news of the VC10 is of no importance anyway. Qantas, the only big jet purchaser, has 13 Boeing 707s in service or on order and is not exactly queuing up to buy VClOs, so what does it matter? This is why it matters: The VC10 is British, it is made by the British aircraft industry, it is made by a company which is trying to sell other products in Australia. Any mud slung at one of these three things is liable to splash the other two. This is not just a persor A opinion: it was put to me repeatedly in Australia by "Sympathetic but hard-headed Australian aviation men who like straight talk and a fair deal. In Tokyo I picked up a copy of a widely read British business magazine to see how it had reported the Minister's statement on the VC10. The magazine is not in front of me: I cannot quote the precise words, but I recall the sense accurately enough. People who know how to read between the lines, it implied, will judge from the Minister's speech that the VC10 may still be in one kind of trouble or another, in which case we may be heading for one of the biggest aviation controversies for years. And that was about all. What am I advocating ? Certainly not any form of muzzling of news about British aircraft, nor any kind of gentleman's agreement to publish only the better news. Objective journalism is the only kind of journalism of value to the journalist or the reader. A reporter who is "on your side" is not going to do you much good in the long run. Pre mature stories about British "world-beaters" which are still unproven do as much harm to British aviation as magnified and exaggerated reports of troubles and con troversies. It would be good to see British aviation reported in balance and in context—reporting based on what was happening, not on what the other correspondents said was happening,
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
