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Aviation History
1965
1965 - 0055.PDF
FLIGHT International, 7 January 1965 38a Qj Straight and Level THIS year I not only had stacks ofChristmas cards from people I'venever heard of, but quite a lot also from people who I am pretty sure have never heard of me. Thank you all, anyway. • IATA, whose laws—as is well known—transcend all others, has decreed— "The airlines have relaxed their regu- lation regarding the six nights sleeping accommodation to the extent that they now regard a car with fully reclining front seats as providing sleeping accommodation in itself." Gad sir, jolly decent of them! Re- minds me of the day Neddie Carruthers drove off with the Colonel's daughter in me two-seater convertible. Dashed roof was ripped to pieces by his spurs! —from a "Sunday Times" drawing of the Globe- master, the radome of which proved too much of a temptation for the retoucher's brush -|p From a Shell advertisement on fuel fungus, to be read out aloud in a David Frost voice:— "The growth was easily identifiable as a fungus—but what fungus? Shell turned this question over to the Commonwealth Mycological Institute at Kew. "Back came the answer: Cladosporium resinae (Lindau) de Vries, a species usually found living on creosoted tele- graph poles . . . "Some water had been found in drain samples taken from aircraft fuel tanks. The most practical solution, therefore: avoid water contact with the fuel and the fungus cannot grow , . ." • "If I were in the airplane business, I'd skip the champagne and fancy meals but break my neck to provide planes that arrived and left exactly on time."—US rail chief Ben Heineman quoted by Life. • From a Comet incident report:— "Examination showed that the port main gear door rear hook operating spring strut plunger tube had fractured." Had what! • Changes are often hard to identify while they are actually happening, but it is not hard to perceive the abrupt halt in the supersonic-airliner race. This week two years ago the race was well and truly on. "We must grab this opportunity with both hands and dash away with the prize," cried Mr Neil Marten about the Concorde. This week one year ago the Americans were within eight days of final design submissions in the American SST programme; and so frenzied had all the airlines become that even BOAC and Air France had joined the lengthy queue for the entirely imag- inary American pseudonic airliner. How different it all looks now. The Concorde will go ahead, but on a proto- type basis and much extended timescale —1974 for production deliveries instead of 1970, and possibly no production at all. The American SST programme now looks as though it has been stuck on the wall, and the go-ahead has been given by the President to the monster 700-troop C-5A (or CX-HLS), which has got Lock- heed, Boeing and Douglas in a lather of excitement. Everyone is relieved that on both sides of the Atlantic the supersonic throttle has been pulled back. What wor- ries me is the idea that the 700-seat passenger subsonic airliner is the alterna- tive. As I suggested on November 12, air transport develops by stages, not by gigantic leaps. A 760-seat airliner opera- ted at competitive frequency in the seven- ties will produce a hopeless amount of empty seats, even on the densest routes, quite apart from its incompatibility with airport terminals and runways. The next stage of development will be the 250-seater subsonic jet, and it is time that Britain was doing something about the super Super VC10. The greatest bles- sing of the supersonic respite is the opportunity that it gives for investment in a new breed of really efficient sub- sonic jets. *Full cooperation with Funeral Directors from coast to coast. From on advertisement in a US magazine • "The member airlines of the Euro- pean Air Research Bureau have com- pleted a programme on baggage hand- ling and are just starting on lost bag- gage . . ." —Flight, December 24. Mine was a hand-tooled coach hide Gladstone with brass knobs on. ROGER BACON If we really try we might. • • Weuland Wapiti of 603 Sqn, September 1933 . . . just make it Demoiselle replica film-making, 1964
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