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Aviation History
1968
1968 - 0071.PDF
Official Organ of the Royal Aero Club First Aeronautical Weekly in the World Founded in 1909 International THURSDAY 18 JANUARY 1968 Number 3071 Volume 93 Editor J. M. RAMSDEN Air Transport Editor H. A. TAYLOR Production Editor ROY CASEY Editorial Director MAURICE A. SMITH DFC Managing Director H. N. PRIAULX MBE In this World News Air Transport Letters Sport and Business Special feature: Light Aircraft Electronics Airline Profile Industry International Spaced ight Defence issue 74 77 85 87 88 96 99 1 00 106 Straight and Level I 0 8a Iliffe Transport Publications Ltd, DorsetHouse, Stamford Street, London SE1; telephone 01-928 3333. Telegrams/Telex: Flight Iliffepres, 25137 London. Annual subscriptions: Home £6. Over-seas £6 for one year; £12 for three years. Canada and USA $18 for one year;$36 for three years. Change of address— please note that four weeks' notice isrequired, together with the return of a wrapper bearing the old address. SecondClass Mail privileges authorised at New York, NY. Branch Offices: Coventry, 8-10 Corpora-tion Street; telephone Coventry 25210. Birmingham. 401 Lynton House, WalsallRoad, Birmingham 22b; telephone 021 BIRchfield 4838. Manchester, 260 Deans-gate, Manchester 3; telephone Blackfriars 4412 or Deansgate 3595. Glasgow, 123Hope Street, Glasgow C2; telephone Central 1265-6. Bristol, 11 Marsh Street,Bristol 1; telephone Bristol 21491-2. New York, NY: Thomas Skinner & Co(Publishers) Ltd, 300 East 42nd Street, New York 10017, USA; telephone 867- © Iliffe Transport Publications Ltd1968. Permission to reproduce illustra- tions and letterpress can be granted onlyunder written agreement. Brief extracts or comments may be made with dueacknowledgement. The Conditions for "Unsafety" Everyone is for air safety. Like motherhood and democracy it attracts much banal comment, which does not impress those people who devote every minute of their waking hours to air safety. The standards sat by those who design, certificate and operate aircraft are without equal in the field of transport. The 1967 world airline accident record was statistically good, as our analysis last week showed. But let us set aside the graphs and tables for a moment and consider two particular accidents which seem to us a microcosm of the essential air safety management problem— communication. The recent Australian report on the Ansett-ANA Viscount tragedy in September 1966 says it was "a matter of the greatest concern" that two previous cabin-blower fires were not known in Australia until after the crash. Secondly, on June 3, 1966, a Trident on a test flight from Hatfield crashed in a deep stall. Nineteen months later the report is still unpublished. Both these accidents might have been prevented by better com- munications. In the case of the Viscount nobody thought that two previous cabin-blower fires were potentially serious enough to warn other Viscount operators about. The view of the manufacturers, the Board of Trade and the Air Registration Board seems to be that it would be impossible to alert operators to every such potentially dangerous defeat. The whole air transport industry would be swamped with paper—itself a failure in communications. Also pleaded is the difficulty of distinguishing between the trivial and the serious, and the fact that information is only as good as that supplied by the operators. There is something in these arguments, but they are not entirely convincing. Here is a random extract from a mandatory-modification bulletin of the US Federal Aviation Administration published in one of our American contemporaries on January 8: Required replacement of the flexible duct between the engine air box and the engine throttle body assembly with an improved duct on Piper PA32-300 and PA325-300 aircraft, within 50 hours in service of the December 22 effective date. Hardly a panic defect, but evidence of somebody's responsibility in the FAA to make sure that everyone (including the technical Press) is communicating with everyone else. The Board of Trade's leisurely handling of the Trident accident is a communications failure of the sort that creates the conditions for "unsafety." Good Communications Air safety is a matter of organisation as well as of communication. There may be something to be said for reducing the number of British bodies concerned. There are two completely separate directorates in the Board of Trade; and there are the Air Registration Board, the Flight Safety Committee, and separate RAF and Fleet Air Arm flight safety departments. This fragmentation of responsibility has advantages and disadvantages, but it cannot improve communications. None of the three civil deep-stall accidents might have happened if the lessons from the Victor and Javelin had been passed on. Military air safety is virtually a world of its own, and the Royal Aircraft Establishment and the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment sometimes seem to be "restricted areas" in more than the physical sense. The silence that envelops every RAF or Fleet Air Arm accident—even when an aircraft of the Queen's Flight crashes— and the secrecy about Service accident rates, are unpardonable misuses of security. "Share your experience" is not an air safety banality. The ARB would seem the body best fitted to improve the whole system of experience-sharing.
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