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Aviation History
1997
1997 - 0092.PDF
—- STRAIGHT A LEVEL 75 YEARS AGO ••• Extracts from Flight, January 12,1922 A Curious Attack on the RAF One of the most amazing attacks which has ever been made on the organisation of die Royal Air Force was launched in the Pall Mall Gazette, when that journal announced in glaring head lines and "shouted" from its placards that there was "Chaos in die Air Force" and that die "present state of tiie force is a national peril"... Some of die statements made are merely ludi crous. For Instance, "At all times the influence of inef ficient officers is bad". Precisely. This was realised by the RAF when die time came for reductions. Hence many were allowed to leave to become "distinguished officers", lamenting the lack of appreciation in a chief who simply would not see what excellent fellows they were... "Many accidents have been due to ignorance." Well, there is obviously a volume of deep thought behind this statement. ••• Aerial Advertising Our Editorial remarks on this subject in last week's issue called forth a visit from the inventor of this new form of smoke signs. He placed at our disposal sufficient material to enable us to form the opinion that, not only are the prospects of a general application of the invention far less annoying than appeared at first sight, but that, apart from any question of aerial advertising, the invention has numerous scientific uses, some of which are undoubtedly ofvery great value indeed. For example, it will probably enable experiments to be made on full-scale machines on problems connected with such complicated subjects as the accurate determination of downwash and of the air velocity at various points in the neighbour hood of the fuselage, wings and tail of an aero plane. Even the smoke signs themselves, we are given to understand, so far from being a blot on nature, are most fascinating things to watch, although the advertisement side is merely an inci dental. We are awaiting an early demonstration. ••• The Art of Press Cutting At times we are favoured with some weird and won derful cuttings from newspapers, but the Christmas festivities account for one which brought us up with a jerk: "A night of Flying Chimney-pots". And then there are folk who maintain aviation has made no progress! Lefebvre's Wright, 1909 BUDGIE BLUES Your Uncle was obviously flying with the control locks engaged when he sug gested that DH Comet 4 Campus had belonged to the RAE(S&L, 4-10 Dec ember 1996). Campus his, of course, belonged to A&AEE Boscombe Down since new. UNCLE ROGERS TOTAL AVIATION BOOKSHELF Tupolev: the Man and His Aircraft, by Paul Duffy and Andrei Kandalov; Airlife Publishing, 101 Longden Road, Shrewsbury, SY3 9EB.UK. Chronological history of the designs of Andrei Nikolaeich Tupolev and the design bureaux with which he was associated, from the ANT Aerosleighs of 1919 and the motor-tor pedo boats and missiles through to the latest Tupolev designs, written by regular Budgie News con tributor Paul Duffy and Tupolev's Andrei Kanda lov. Short biographies of Tupolev himself and other major players in the story are included. Landings: clear progres sion through the types; hugely _^ ^«*m future large airliners, a diought: back in 1957, Tu polev's outstandingTu-114 ultra-long-range turbo prop airliner featured, amongst other things, a 40- seat "dining hall" for the 120 passengers. Can we have this back, please, so the 120kg gorilla in the seat in front won't shake our plastic food trays into our laps every ten minutes? • And another thought: when the Tu-114 first went into service, its NK-12 engines had a TBO of just 600h. Typical for the time, maybe, but how many other '50s airliners were doing sectors from Mos cow to Havana taking 20h? How many operators today would accept 30 cycles be tween engine changes...? comprehensive appendices of specs, produc tion numbers and histories etc; two good indic es; endlessly ab sorbing trivia; Crashes: apal- ling quality of Soviet-era pics (most of them were ham-fistedly retouched back then); strange Soviet-isms such as endless references to "The Great Patriotic War"; pointlessly over-accurate imperial conversions of original metric dimensions. TAB Rating: [X] Top Shelf • For those designing "We have changed the exec utive clasH into buadness eluns and business elass into super-tourist clkKK. Kxceutive clasK ip < less popular for European i tourists, especially French," Maas SikumbHng Haid. "Tourists are treated as busi ness class passengers with executive class tickets." The Jakarta Post, Indonesia, 9 December, 1996 YUCKSPEAK Series of 1,000,000 "Restructuring the devel opment programme" = late UNCLE ROGER'S GUIDE TO ACCIDENT REPORTING "The B777 was carrying wet cargo in the forward cargo hold" : The Bill was carryingfivgs "A false smoke warning was activated by moisture from the wet cargo": The frogs sweated PBN Islander, Papua New Guinea, February 1994 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 8 - 14 January 1997
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