FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1979
1979 - 0041.PDF
FLIGHT International, 6 January 1979 39 designing military aeroplanes and civil ones and making them both work. You run through the list. There is a tremendous difference between military and civil aero planes which people don't understand. Civil aeroplanes have more in common with other forms of civil transport than they have with military aeroplanes. They're about as difficult, but the difficulties are quite different. For example, it would have been much easier to have designed a Mach 2 bomber than it would have been to design the Concorde. For one thing the internal environment is quite different. Had Chadwick lived he would have emerged with some good civil aeroplanes to his credit, but in the immediate post-war era, when all we were really doing was tarting up bombers like the old Viking, there wasn't much scope. Engines were designed for performance, and so for that matter was the airframe. Life in Britain was difficult for a civil aircraft designer at that time. The Viking was a much less demanding job than the Tudor. The great significance of the Viking was that Vickers were breaking out of geodetics and getting into stressed skin, which we should have done years before. You have to remember that in the generation of aero planes we are talking about you only survived by superior performance. Keg Mitchell, when he did the Spitfire, got that extra bit of performance over what Sydney Camm got with the Hurricane, though he made it a more difficult aeroplane to build. There's no doubt that the elliptical wing of the Spitfire was much more difficult to build than the straight wing of the Hurricane. I think embedded in everybody was the need for survival, which carried with it the necessity for superior performance, so that you weren't just making a bit of fodder for the other chap's fighter. I think that getting performance out of our system, and other things in, was one of the hard tasks in the transition from military to civil aeroplanes. Chadwick's greatness was that he achieved a standard that wasn't far short of the optimum in performance, yet an aeroplane that was capable of being manufactured easily. Another great man whom I admired was Lord Hives of Rolls-Royce. He was very kind and he had tremendous qualities of leadership. He was, I think, never really happy in the civil engine business. He never really fully under stood it. But he knew the military engine business inside out. Hives embodied a lot of the things I have talked about in the others. The pursuit of quality was there, without a doubt. So was his driving passion for work, and the way he got other people to work. Here we're back to Nelson and Brunei. I used to spend a lot of time with Hives. For years Vickers had fitted Bristol engines to their aeroplanes. Then we began to get involved with Rolls. We put Merlins into some Wellingtons. When I was experimental manager I did the high-altitude Wellington with the pressure cabin and the Merlins 60 and 61. We built many of the flying testbeds with the W2B Whittle jet stuck in the tail end. I suppose the first great moment of truth I had to face was in the Dart/Mamba competition. We were doing the Viscount and Armstrong-Whitworths were doing the Apollo. A decision had to be made sooner or later about the engines. I was put under very great pressure to go for the Mamba. Both engines were supposed to be 1,000 h.p. and the Mamba had done its 120hr type test, and on paper couldn't be faulted. The Dart was about 50 per cent up in weight, way down on power and I think about double on consumption. I don't recall the exact numbers but it was a mile away from what it should have been. But the centrifugal compressor of the Dart was based upon the Merlin impeller. Compared with the delicate Mamba it really was a bit of agricultural machinery. I said to Mr Hives, as he then was, that "it is all against all the betting but I will push very hard for the Dart for the Viscount." He had a great meeting, as he used to do, with all his lads up at Derby. There was a moment—more than one—when they were about to say "to hell with it, we really are too far from getting it right, let's forget it." But Hives just said "we're in business, and we have got-to do something about it." Down went their heads, the fur flew in the accustomed style, the performance was developed and of course they've sold heaven knows how many thousands of them, and still are. Hives was the central figure in Rolls-Royce and his people worshipped him. Like Nelson and Brunei, he led his men from the front. You don't drive other people when you do that. You drive yourself. That's what Nelson and Brunei did. If you do it yourself you get loyalty and the troops will do it too. You may even have to slow them down. When you see some of them who haven't got the constitution that you have got yourself, you have got to put a restraining hand on them. One of the great dangers of the leader who is possessed of great mental and physi cal strength is that he can go blinding on, and his chaps will go blinding on with him determined not to let the old lad down. But those not possessed of the necessary stamina may crack. Hives's great strength was his understanding that an outfit that relies on the quality of its engineering has to get the engineering right, otherwise nothing else is any good. I remember when they got into that fearful trouble with the Avon compressor. I'd caused a bit of anguish because I had made a root of the Valiant wing with its swept-back intakes and I'd put a Sapphire in one and an Avon in the other and every time you opened the throttle the Avon stalled while the Sapphire roared up to full power as sweet as a nut. Armstrong Siddeley wasn't all that highly thought of at the time and yet old Hives took all his team round there and said: "Look, you know how to make a compressor better than we do. We'd better come to some arrangement whereby we can change the Avon compressor so that it does as well as your Sapphire one does." What was wrong with the Avon compressor was that it hadn't enough blades; it was stalling. I have no doubt that the youngsters today are all right. I see this through the University of Surrey, where I have been pro-Chancellor since it was formed. They have stopped being hippies. That stage is over. They have got it out of their system. They have all the basic ingredients. Look around British Aerospace, Rolls-Royce or the Royal Air Force. Maybe you can't identify a Chadwick, a Hives or a Portal. But they are all there. If the middle professionals are not doing their job properly the boardroom is powerless and the direction of the shop floor is probably wrong too. If there is one thing that I know, it is that the best professionals the British have got are better than the best professionals anybody else can produce, I have no doubt about that. But they have got to be properly led. Freddie Page 60 Among the aircraft for which F. W. Page, who leads the aircraft group of British Aerospace, has had direct or ultimate British technical responsibility are the Canberra, Lightning, Jaguar, TSR.2, and Tornado CONGRATULATIONS on all that you have done for the cause of aerospace and on your "three score years and ten." That may be the natural lifespan of man but Flight and aerospace have a long way to go yet. As a schoolboy in the late 1920s, with an intense interest in science, I remember visiting the Science Museum in London many times and becoming fascinated by the engineering exhibits. So much had been achieved in so short a time, but how much more the future promised, particularly in aviation. The excitement and the challenge were irresistible. Of course I read Flight. The more one practised, read and learned of engineer ing over many years subsequently, the more one came to
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
