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Aviation History
1963
1963 - 2127.PDF
928 Letters Letters for these columns are welcomed, though "Flight Inter national" does not necessarily endorse the views expressed. Name and address should be given, not necessarily for publication in full. Brief letters will have a better chance of early publication. Supersonic Plight Engineers SIR,—I do not wish to rekindle the flames of the controversy which have drifted back and forth for the last couple of years, but I would like to comment on the remarks made by Capt Spooner at the recent IFALPA symposium in London and printed in your November 21 issue. He envisaged his crew on the Concorde as a co-pilot with an "ordinary ALTP like himself" and a third pilot with a Commercial Pilot's Licence. The third pilot would carry out the engineering and electronic duties. It would appear to me that unless Capt Spooner has a flight engineer trained to CPL standard in mind, and this I doubt, then he is engaging in a very subtle form of one- upmanship. If this sort of remark is made frequently enough and loudly enough, in the right place and at the right time, it will eventually be accepted as fact and the flight engineer will disappear from the flight deck, having been talked out of his seat. As someone who has a personal interest in this I feel that flight engineers cannot reply to this form of attack because as a body they do not have a very loud voice in the appro priate influential spheres. Recently your magazine published photographs of the Concorde mock-up. One of these showed the flight engineer's position, not the systems operator's station. I feel certain that the public who are going to travel in the Concorde would like to feel that the three seats at the front are occupied by the most competent crew available and that the man in the flight engineer's position is an experienced technician with possibly anything from ten to twenty-five years in aviation—not a newly-joined pilot who is using the seat as a temporary resting-place on his way to the right and eventually the left-hand seat. Finally, I would also like to say that there are many flight engineers today who are taking out Private Pilot's Licences and Radio Licences, thus giving them a small glimpse of the pilot's job. This remark will probably make the professional pilot smile. But reverse the situation: aircraft are getting more and more complicated, but is the young professional pilot putting in a bit of private study into the intricacies of trans former rectifiers or power control units or cold-air units and getting an insight into the flight engineer's background? Camberley, Surrey R. BINFIELD SIR,—I wonder if the "supersonic pilots" have considered the cost of their fail-safe crew postulated at IFALPA's SST symposium and reported in Flight International ofNovember 21 ? In point of fact the over-riding consideration appears to be pilot employment, not safety or economy. The mean time between failures of the human pilot is such that the necessity for musical chairs does not arise. In any event the aircraft can be flown from either side and the crew member at what the manufacturers rightly call the engineer's station cannot leave this position. There is a case for extra training for the third member but this can most effectively and economically be achieved by extending the engineer's duties into electronics and com munications, without the enormous cost of the crew training imposed on American operators by the present subsonic crewing agreements. What price the extra flying hours required on the Concorde—for very little gain in flexibility and none in safety ? I have great regard for the operating ability of pilots. FLIGHT International, 5 December 1963 but their associations' crewing policies do not stand up on either of the grounds on which they are pressed on the operator—safety or economy. Woodley, Berks IAN CARTER (FLT ENG) Ferrymen's Deficit SIR,—In your article "Three Ferrymen" in Flight Inter national for November 14, page 786, there are a few points which I feel need clarification. It is stated that we have applied for a licence for Manston- Luxembourg. This is incorrect, although there is a possi bility that we may do so at some future date. Secondly, I feel there must be some mistake in a reference to a Silver City Airways' deficit of £2m which, it is said, was caused by the "massive low-fare boat competition." I am certain that this figure is nothing like correct and should not be related to their vehicle ferry operations, as I feel this state ment could be misinterpreted and reflect unfavourably on the Silver City organization up until the time of take-over by Air Holdings Ltd. The last point is regarding the following extract from the article: "The DC-4 they [Air Ferry] explained, was the Carvair, which could be delivered in three months; the DC-6 with side-loading was a vehicle carrier; and the DC-7 the Board could forget about as a vehicle ferry." Although I did make reference to the fact that I consider the DC-4, DC-6 or the DC-7 could be considered as vehicle- carrying aircraft without any extensive structural modifica tions, due to the fact that side-loading could be achieved on all three, I did not advocate that this was the best solution; I was making the point that large modifications did not h ave to be carried out to these aircraft to enable them to qualify for this role. I went on to say that there were other possible major modifications which could be applied to any other aircraft mentioned without necessarily using the Carvair principle, one of these being the swing-tail method. I cer tainly did not say that the Board could forget about the DC-7 as a vehicle ferry aircraft. What I did say was that the Board could forget about the DC-7 as a vehicle ferry aircraft as far as our particular application was concerned. Manston Airport, Kent H. C. KENNARD, Managing Director, Air Ferry Ltd [According to the 1961 accounts of British Aviation Services of which Silver City formed a major, if not the whole, part) the accumulated deficit, as noted in last week's issue, page 856, was £I$m.—Ed) Historians and Pioneers SIR,—Despite Laurence Pritchard's disclaimer (Letters, November 14), his monographs in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society are beautiful examples of the historian's art. I would not dream of disagreeing with his pointer that the Wrights' successes stirred European pioneers to greater activity—even though his last two quotations were from letters part and parcel of the Wrights' struggle to substan tiate the validity of their patents as "prior art," That of July 1910 was prompted by an editorial in the Scientific American stating: "Curtiss was using hinged wing-tips . . . ante-dating ... the Wrights." Wilbur's letter of 1908 was a brief to Orville instructing him to refute various forged "interview" stories, and significantly goes on to say that though Ferber "built several gliding machines of a pattern he called the Wright type, the resemblance was merely in outward form, the essential features of control not being shown at the time." The Wrights had begun to believe that their old friend Octave Chanute disclosed too much of their secrets, and were ruffled because he considered that European enthusiasts would catch them up. "Are you not too cocksure," Chanute wrote, "that yours is the only secret worth knowing, and that others may not hit upon a solution in less than 'many times five years' stated by Wilbur?" When this warning was rather arrogantly swept aside, Chanute replied: "I do not agree with your way of thinking ... Be that as it may, I suspect you realize Esault-Pelterie, Ferber, Bleriot & Voisin,
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