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Aviation History
1969
1969 - 0013.PDF
A New Year [FDJiEKnr INTERNATIONAL incorporating AEROPLANE •ounded in 1909. Official organ of the Royal Vero Club. First aeronautical weekly in he world. © Published by lliffe Transport •ublications Ltd, Dorset House, Stamford Street, London SE1. Telephone 01-928 3333 dumber 3121 Volume 95 rhursday 2 January 1969 Editor J. M. Ramsden Air transport editor H. A. Taylor Production editor Roy Casey Assistant editors Neil Harrison, CEng, AFRAeS Humphrey Wynn, BA Assistant technical editor Michael Wilson, BSc, CEng, AFRAeS Editorial director Maurice A. Smith DFC Managing director H. N. Hriaulx MBE IN THIS ISSUE World News 2 Parliament 4 Air Transport 5 Our 60th Anniversary 13 We Stood to Fight 14 Industry International 16 Special feature: Aero Engines 1969 17 Private Flying 31 Letters 35 Spaceflight 37 Defence 40 Straight and Level 42 Front cover shows the Vulcan modified to carry an Olympus 593 supersonic turbojet in support of the Concorde programme. There are various measures of success in the aircraft business, but perhaps the one that matters most in the national sense is export sales. The year just ended has registered another record—£250 million—and this may be exceeded in 1969. The backlog of orders and booming world demand for aviation products of every kind will probably sustain this level of exports well into the seventies. Before the end of the next decade aircraft could be Britain's most important engineering industry, con tributing more to the balance of pay ments than motors, shipbuilding, or civil engineering. Already the order book for aircraft, aero engines, space systems, guided weapons and equip ment is the biggest in British industry. Aircraft are import savers as well as export earners. Decisions on new projects like the airbus and the MRCA have to take into account the fact that the national airlines and the Services will be spending thousands of millions of pounds on new equipment during the rest of this century. This sort of money will have to be spent some where; and if most of it is spent in America—which is the logical con sequence of the present projects paralysis—someone had better start worrying soon where the dollars are coming from. The £250 million exports in 1968 were nearly all products launched before 1964, and projected long before that. The momentum of product development will maintain sales well into the seventies; but new seed will have to be sown soon to provide for the years beyond. Neither of Britain's airframe groups has launched a com pletely new aircraft for eight years, with the exceptions of the French- designed Jaguar and the Canadian Twin Otter. There is no shortage of new project ideas; but the system for launching them seems to have become paralysed. The high cost of modern technology requires massive public expenditure, which means that government must be intimately involved. The Whitehall machine, and the politicians in its thrall, have not—as the Fulton report found—yet adapted sufficiently to the disciplines of commerce and tech nology. Britain's excellent technical Civil Service, instead of being directly answerable to the searching questions of a well informed Parliament, is of small account in the major decisions. These fall to Ministers and administra tive civil servants, estimable but itinerant all-rounders, whose game of musical administrators has little place in modern Britain. The year which has just begun marks the tenth anniversary of the launching of TSR.2. The infirmities of the system that launched it may be illumined by the £295 million spent to date on an operational requirement with nothing to show for it that the RAF can see. Tablets from a bottle labelled European Collaboration do not seem to be the answer. But there are hopeful forces working in the right direction: an insatiable world appetite for aviation products of every kind; an awareness among the more enlightened civil servants of their system's shortcomings; and a new self- esteem and self-sufficiency in industry. Apollo 8 Since our first issue 60 years ago today Flight has recorded many feats of technology, navigation and courage that have astonished and changed the world. None ranks with that recorded on pages 37-39 of this issue. A
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