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Aviation History
1964
1964 - 1311.PDF
734 FLIGHT International 30 AfirW /9M "Half-a-dozen prestige liners race to and from New York at 30kt.. .•• The French Line's /W. ship, "France" "FULL OF SOUND...SIGNIFY ING NOTHING"... New York, or dinner appointments in Sydney. A 707 takes us from London to New York in 7|hr (2|hr if we omit the time difference), and to Sydney in a day-and-a-half, and there are not many ordinary people who do not find this quite enough to get accustomed to. Regardless of people's preference, frantic preparations are already being made to carry passengers at speed-record pace, at more than twice the speed of sound, almost as fast as anything military which is not a missile. Protagonists of the supersonic airliner claim that when these aircraft are in service "people will prefer" (to quote MEA's Sheikh Najib Alamuddin recently) to travel at supersonic speed. With respect, what ordinary people prefer nowadays appears to have very little influence on public transport, its equipment, services or anything else. How many passengers "prefer" to have a Deltic diesel, rather than a steam locomotive, at the front of the Flying Scotsman, as long as the train keeps to its schedule ? How many will even know the difference, or take the trouble to find out ? How many, preferring to travel by train, have been told to go by bus in future? If and when SSTs become an established fact, a few people in a hurry will use them because they are in a hurry, a few more will wish to experience the novelty. The vast, very ordinary majority will travel this way because "Flight BA— to New York" will just happen to be supersonic, which would mean as little to them as would the type of locomotive at the front of the Flying Scotsman. The Concord project is a beautiful shape; it looks good, but will it be good enough ? Is our experience of supersonic aircraft, based on relatively few fighters, and one or two research machines (minus two T.I88s!), sufficient to compete with the know-how which the Americans—and the Russians—must have accumulated from hundreds of Mach 2 aircraft, including four-engined bombers (plus 12 or so A-lls!)? It is irritating to read attempts by "authoritative" commentators in responsible London dailies to belittle the achievements of the Americans. We are sometimes inclined to under-estimate the ability of our American competitors, and to disregard our own history (Tudor and Comet 1!). Is it a wise decision for us to launch, so soon, a commercial project so big and so fast, with so little practical experience of Mach 2 airframes, engines and systems ? Thousands of new components, the products of nearly 200 manufacturers in at least three countries, are to be assembled by builders in two countries into identical hulls, the bare structures of which will represent the sum of the manufacturing participation in the project of these two main contractors. The result must present a support (i.e., spares provisioning) problem vastly more complex than anything which has ever been tackled before. At least the Americans should enjoy one advantage, in that everything in their aircraft would be manufactured in their own country. Knowing how difficult it is to control support of a uni- national aircraft, the mind boggles at the tangle which will confront the support men concerned with the Concord. Can two such intensely proud rivals as Britain and France achieve this lasting partnership of absolute equality in the Concord ? We do not even spell the name of the aircraft in the same way. The vendor content of a modern airliner comprises almost every- thing which moves or functions within the aircraft. Will the ven- dors, who will have made the works of the SSTs, be equal to the demands of supersonic schedules, or will they be found wanting, as sometimes happens with subsonic vehicles? One clear certainty in the midst of all the doubts surrounding supersonic transport is that an unscheduled delay will be intolerable to a commercial operator who wants to make money with SSTs, and not merely to use them as status symbols. What sums will a supersonic airline have to face when subsonic transport costs more than £500 per grounded hour? Obviously, any passenger who really wants to travel supersonic will do so because he is in a great hurry. Three hours' delay, which might be tolerable, if tiresome, at the start of a journey of several hours will be intolerable and irretrievable if the destination is only three hours distant. Imagine the frustration of impatient men stuck at Heathrow for as long as, or longer than, it would take them to get from there to New York! British Railways have been faced with similar problems in the operation of their Blue Pullman trains. For more than three years two £400,000, 132-seat train-sets have been required in order to maintain a once-daily return service between Manchester and St Pancras (with a mid-day dash to Nottingham and back) five days a week only. Even this costly precaution of keeping a second set permanently in reserve is of use only when the train in operation fails at Manchester, its home base. An evening failure at the other end leaves frustrated passengers with no alternative but to return home by the next ordinary service; the whole purpose of this high- speed, super-luxury service is then lost. In order to achieve 765 train-operating days during three years, British Railways have accepted the necessity for an additional 1,425 train-moperative days as insurance against failures. Only foolish airlines will be caught in the surplus-capacity trap a second time. Operators contemplating supersonic services cannot afford big fleets of vehicles costing anything from £4 to £12 million each. They will certainly not be able to afford reserve aircraft. Protagonist s of SSTs claim superior economics over existing aircraft, because of the greater annual carrying capacity of the supersonic machines—assuming, of course, that the capacity of each aircraft is up aloft, carrying payload, and that time on the ground is limited French Railways photojrsph ". . . the French have propelled a'train at more than 200 m.p.h." Electric locomotive BB9004, which hauled a three-car train at 205.6 m.p.h. in 1955 strictly to routine apron and hangar servicing. Has sufficient attention been paid so far, to the need for absolute reliability? 1' might be rather unwise to count on the infallibility of such a mass of untried equipment, mainly electronic, the like of which can never have been seen before, assembled together in one commercial aircraft. BAC's Dr Russell has himself admitted, only a few months ago, that reliability in a SST "Might never be quite as good" as in a subsonic jet (Flight International, December 19, 1963). Last year a "speck of dust" in a valve felled the P. 1127 at le Bourget and erratic gyros brought down the SCI; two years ago a defecwe instrument caused a Comet crash at Ankara. The January 9. I?6* issue of Flight International lists 21 jet accidents, 17 of them wer catastrophic, which have occurred in the five years since jet ope - ations began and have not been fully explained. Some, at Isast, o these disasters must have been caused by undiscovered defects i equipment inside the aircraft; other potential catastrophes mu have been averted by the timely removal of defective compo«cn' on the ground. If SST component reliability is indeed not Sol"g be "quite as good" as in a subsonic jet, then precautions oi
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