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Aviation History
1991
1991 - 2590.PDF
STRAIGHTOTLEVEL More about the man, please The worst thing about good aeroplane designers is that they design good aeroplanes, so when people come to write books or give lectures about them, they get sidetracked by the good aeroplanes and don't give enough space to the good aeroplane designers. That inevitable fate has befallen John Fozzard's book on the fearsome and beloved Sydney Camm and his aero planes,* It's full of great aeroplane material (much of it previously unpublished) and would be a much better thing to be on every total aviation person's desk than computer-generated reports on the feasibility of put ting coloured plastic lids on crew lunch boxes, but it doesn't tell you much more about the man than you probably already knew. The book is a series of papers written in the past few decades by authors great and good — including Camm himself, Sir Robert Lickley, Philip Lucas and Ralph Hooper. As Fozard himself says in the introduction: "This is, I believe, the first book to appear with Sir Sydney Camm as its subject. While not in any way minded to think of this as a coup, I find it surprising." Quite — and a proper biography would mafee a great companion to this work. "Sydney Camm and the Hurricane, edited by Drjohn W Fozard, Airlife Publishing, Shrewsbury, England. "Sorry, Son, Mr Camm says he doesn't like air-cooled engines for his monoplanes..." "Rehearsing for Empire Air Day at North Weald Aerodrome, Epping, Essex — a Hawfeer Hurricane pilot interested in a 1/20 horse-power petrol-driven flying model aeroplane before taking off in his l,000hp machine, 18/5/39," it says on the bach. Which is the oldest fly- Short Sunderland, 201 (?) Squadron, Pembroke Dock, "40 years ago" according to Nephew Peter Price, who's the bloke crawling out of the astro-hatch... The pilot stated that he flew the approach at 55 kt and had cleared the trees by 30 to 40 feet after which the glidepath must have become slightly too low and, at the time when his view of the hedge would have cued him to this fact, the hedge was totally obscured by the lower wing. The aircraft passed through the hedge and, as it landed in the long grass in a nose down attitude, the right mainwheel struck a hare and spun the aircraft round, causing it to turn over. Air Accidents Investigation Branch Bulletin, UK, September 1991 YUCKSPEAK Series of 1,000,000 " ...non-compensatory in dustry marketing ac tions..." = failed promo tion UNCLE ROGER'S FLIGHT-SAFETY QUIZ Q: What safety procedure is so dangerous that airline cabin staff are not allowed to indulge in it? A: Practising emergency evacuations on slides in cabin simulators... UNCLE ROGER'S TECHNICAL DERBY Q: What do you call firing eight birds into the intake of the Multispool Megafan, instead of the usual six, during ingestion trials? A: Overkill • At the back of the Rolls- Royce technology demon stration area at Derby, there's a section called "TAP". At last, thinks Uncle Roger, there's some thing nice and easy to understand, instead of these single-crystal direc- tionally solidified Warren- girder lost-wax superplas- tic nacelle bolts. A board full of total aviation per sons, like Hives, and Hooker and Conway, per haps? No — a board full of a detailed description of transient accoustic propa gation, no less. Ah well, perhaps a total aviation person invented it, what ever it is... • Q: Name the odd one out: DC-10, Falcon 50/ 900, L1011 TriStar, 727, Trident. A: The Falcon: all the others had, have or will have Rolls engines (if American goes ahead with its DC-10 re-engining). ing club in the world? The oldest one in England, ac cording to itself, is the recently reconstituted Cinque Ports Flying Club, which was first formed in 1928 at Lympne. Since then it's been based at Lydd (in the 1970s) and Headcorn (1984-88) and Limbo (1988 until 1 Sep tember this year, when it was re-formed at Lydd). Any/many older ones still around out there? An swers on the usual inter esting postcard.... Compiled by Our Staff From Dispatches NEW YORK — Service was restored Wednesday after a power break at an AT&T switching center virtually shut the New York area's three major air ports for several hours and snarled air traffic across the nation. AT&T said the outage, which affected all long distance and some local calls, was caused by a blown fuse at a switching station in lower Manhattan. The effects of the failure, which occurred at 4:50 P.M. EDT on Tuesday, were minimized to some degree because most businesses, including the stock markets, had already closed for the day and many city -i«rc U*A !»<•• »hi.;r j0DS enrUi ^ be home for the Capt Speaking: "Hello JFK — Birdseed 123 here. Am I cleared for landing?" Atco Annie: "Sorry Birdseed — we're closed. The fuse has gone in the Wonderdigit Voicebus system." Capt Speaking: "Great — I'm not allowed to take off in this triple-redundant, thrice-certificated, ETOPS- approved Maxicrate if the loo-paper dispenser in the Number four forward toilet is empty, but you're allowed to control me through a non-redundant, single-channel squawkbox run from a public phone booth on 5th Avenue. Haven't you got a four-inch nail or a bit of cigarette paper to fix it?" (Wall Street Journal, 19 September, 1991) FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 2 - 8 October, 1991
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