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Aviation History
1970
1970 - 0049.PDF
FLIGHT International, I January 1970 32a Straight and It's baffling all right, but it's all explained in the . instruction manual (1926 Light Aircraft Trials, France) AHAPPY AND PROSPEROUS new decade to you all. Thank you for your Christmas cards. And thank you Rolilo for the crate of champers, which of course I shall be returning. • Did you see Mr Duncan Sandys on the telly the other night arguing the case for capital punishment? As Minister of Defence in 1957 he put British military aviation back ten years by saying that there would be no more manned aircraft. As Minister of Aviation in 1960 he introduced the Civil Aviation Licensing Act, which has now got air transport into such a muddle. I'm for the abolitionists. • "Certainly BEA is one of the few operators making substantial profits in the short-haul world", says Sir Anthony Milward, chairman of BEA. Permission to speak. If that is so, why do BEA need £13 million of public money for the years 1970-71 and 1971-72? Answer: this money, and a further £10 million-plus to follow, is compensa tion for not being allowed to buy Boeings. I will make a deal with BEA. I, too, promise to pretend that a subsidy is a profit if BEA will publish in detail the sums and assumptions on which their £25 million-plus subsidy was computed. • My thanks to the Russians for their detailed reply to our questionnaire about their entries in our recent Commercial Aircraft number. Here in my hands I hold the actual letter, typed in excellent English in Moscow, from Aviaexport Thank you, comrades, for your trouble and here's to closer relations and better understanding through aviation. • From the BALPA symposium: "Air transport reliability has certainly im proved remarkably in the past decade. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that after a half-million-mile Apollo 11 space voyage involving a lunar landing with 30 seconds of reserve fuel, a turn around and single-engine take-off with no ground crew assistance, a complex rendezvous and docking manoeuvre, and a plunge into the Pacific Ocean—the 50 pounds of lunar rock samples were very carefully flown back to Texas in two separate transport aircraft". • Everbody has written to protest about my views on candyfloss air transport. Just to stir it up again, I hold that public money should not be spent on the provi sion of holiday air transport, and that it would be better spent on air services aimed at improving the economy—trade and industry and all that. In the last two months ten towns and cities in Britain have had their air services withdrawn. Please somebody post me a message of support from one of them. It will cheer me up no end. Siid Concorde supersonic transport. He J said the Concorde could fly almost the! same distance in subsonic configuration I it could subsonicaUv: the specific! From "Canadian Aviation", November 1969 Actually, your Majesty, it really ought to have five prongs . . . (Trident 3B fuselage en route from Blackburns to de Havillands, or whatever they're called now) • My train-spotter friend writes to point out that while the GWR King class locomotives did have the thrust of a JT9D, I should have called their drag- link a draw-bar. You can't be too careful—to the train enthusiast this clanger must be as ghastly as calling the Tiger Moth a jet. Incidentally he adds that the 747 could pull the biggest American locomotive under full steam backwards. • Mr H. Don Reynolds of IATA des cribes the recent fares negotiations as "the most difficult in the history of human relations". Oh, I don't know—I'd have thought my ten-year negotiations with IATA for carrier-by-carrier North Atlantic traffic figures qualified for that £W**~ tj#*&V*>
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