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Aviation History
1967
1967 - 1160.PDF
Air-Cushion Vehicles INTERNATIONAL NEWS... a Villiers 9 h.p. two-stroke engine driving two centrifugal glass-fibre fans, and a similar engine driving a 3ft wooden ducted airscrew. Primary control is through two rudders behind the duct. Weighing 6001b in operational trim, the craft measures 10ft by 5ft and will be tested to 50 m.p.h. in the early part of the programme, later increas- ing to 70 m.p.h. with a more powerful propulsion engine. Daylight clearance of the peripheral-jet skirted craft is approximately lin. Main fields of re- search will include stability and con- trol, fan and skirt design and develop- ment of ACV instrumentation. A US Hover Club An association to further the amateur development of ACVs was recently formed by a number of prominent experimenters in the United States. A board of directors, all pioneers in American ACVs, has been formed. They will serve as con- sultants to the association. Members are Col Melville Beardsley, Skimmers Inc; Dr W. Bertelsen, Bertelsen Manufacturing Co; Mr Frank Dob- son, Dobson Products Inc; Mr Thomas Sweeney and Mr W. Nixon, both of Princeton University; Dr Alfred Skolnick, director of the sur- face-effect-ship project at the David Taylor Model Basin, and his asso- ciate director, Mr A. G. Ford; and Mr Jan Eglen, Eglen-Cull Air- Cushion Vehicles Inc. Mr Eglen, of 362 Santa Isabel Ave, Costa Mesa, Calif 92627, is the acting secretary and organiser. Canadian Symposium The Canadian Department of In- dustry is sponsoring a hovercraft symposium in Toronto on May 10 and 11. It is to open with a "working dinner," followed by a tightly packed day of papers, presentations and films on the following day. The audience will comprise poten- tial Canadian operators and members of the engineering industries who could become involved in future ACV manufacture, and the sym- posium is designed to give them a thorough briefing on the current de- velopment status. In Britain the initial reaction of the NRDC, BHC and the Hovercraft Policy Committee was to ignore the symposium, fearing that too much might be given away but this decision led to strong protests from Canada through the diplomatic network, and Prop or Super-fan? Hawker Siddeley Dynamics have completed the first I9ft-dia propellers for the prototype BHC SR.N4 now being built. Based upon the hub developed for the Transall C.I 60 air freighter, the N4 propellers are designed for relatively low tip speeds and are the largest built in Europe pressure via the Commonwealth Rela- tions Office and Mintech on the in- dustry to show the flag. When it be- came clear that the symposium was essentially a detailed laymen's briefing rather than an in-depth exposure be- fore rival engineers, the objections largely collapsed anyway. Mr Christopher Cockerell will be the principal speaker after the dinner on the 10th; Hoverwork managing director Christopher Bland will talk LETTERS Amateurs' Use of Patents SIR,—In last month's Air-Cushion Vehicles you have reported on my lecture to the Hoverclub of Great Britain at Great Malvern on March 4- 5 and you draw the conclusion from what I said that "this seems to amount to a tacit permission for amateurs to use HDL patents without fear of objection." In the absence of any mention of the proviso which I was careful to make at the time, this in- terpretation seems to go rather too far. The point I was making (in a general context and not just in respect of HDL's patents) was that a patentee would be slow to pursue the amateur builder who infringes his patents un- less the activity in amateur building reached such proportions as to be hurtful to the patentee's own commer- cial interest. In other words, although it may be unattractive and unneces- sary to sue an individual amateur builder for infringement because he is making only one machine, one might reach the point at which there was so much amateur activity that serious inroads were being made on FLIGHT International supplement, 20 A0ril 1967 on operations on the 11th, and | Hovermarine may also take part. BHC will be represented by assistant managing director R. Stanton Jones. Scandinavian Promotion *«P Hovermarine opened a hard sales drive for its range of sidewall ACVs in Scandinavia on April 1, with a stand at the nine-day International Sea Transport Exhibition in Gothen- burg. Managing director Norman Piper and chief development engin- eer R. D. Trillo spent several days meeting prospective Scandinavian cus- tomers, and further overseas appear- ances are booked in exhibitions at Helsinki and Monaco later in the year. 10 Years Up A significant tenth anniversary in British ACV affairs slipped by un- marked last Sunday, April 16. It was precisely ten years since Mr Christopher Cockerell and Mr R. A. Shaw visited Mr Maurice Brennan, chief designer of what was then Saunders-Roe Ltd, at Cowes, to place the first official hovercraft contract. This was for a piece of research to verify results Mr Cockerell had obtained in model tests. the market for commercially produced machines. At this point it might be necessary either to take action to re- strain the infringers or to demand royalties from them through some kind of licensing arrangement in order to protect the commercial market. I felt that this should be made clear. London SW1 H. W. GRACE, Patents Controller, National Research Development Corporation British ACVs in Vietnam SIR,—Your correspondents McManus and Stride (February Air-Cushion Vehicles) may well be dismayed at the evaluation of hovercraft in the Vietnam war. The war has been a glorious oppor- tunity for American (and, it seems, British) military strategists and manu- facturers to evaluate new logistic and weapon systems. Cynics would claim this as the raison d'etre of the Viet- nam conflict. If wars can be graded in degrees of inhumanity, a war which is perpetuated in some way by military research and commercial profit comes high on the list. R. C. HORNBY, BSC Queen's University, Belfast 46
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