The disturbance due to aircraft noise which is being experienced in residential areas around the world's major airports is generally recognised as a serious problem. Indeed, the problem has reached the stage where public reaction is already influencing the development of future aircraft. Such influence may be seen in current international intention to include noise limitations in the certification of aircraft.

Limits imposed on the noise generated by aircraft engines should serve to prevent the problem from becoming catastrophic, but cannot be expected to provide a final solution. Aircraft manufacturers may seem confident that further improvements in performance could be achieved without corresponding increase in noise, but further increases in air traffic could cancel out these gains and still leave communities near airports excessively disturbed.

Annex 9 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation is entitled “Facilitation” and in the foreword to the fifth edition there is what might be termed a definition of facilitation … “all practical measures, through the issuance of special regulations or otherwise, to facilitate or expedite navigation by aircraft between the territories of Contracting States, and to prevent unnecessary delays to aircraft, crews, passengers and cargo, especially in the administration of the laws relating to immigration, quarantine, customs and clearance”. I am here to give a shipper's view of facilitation and therefore, am concerned only with cargo. I hope my views are not coloured by experiences I have had as crew or passenger which tend to be much more personal and immediate.

In the past few years, many different VTOL experimental aircraft have been developed and tested in Europe, the USA and Russia and a great deal of experience has been gained.

Dornier's contribution in this field is the development and testing of the Do 31 VTOL jet transport (Fig. 1). A V/STOL aircraft concept had to be found, uniting the main advantages of relatively high flight speed, high pay-load capacity, operational flexibility, low maintenance requirements and great safety in case of engine failure. The Do 31 features these characteristics.

All forms of transport generate conflicts between the requirements of vehicles and the limits of infra-structures. The struggle, however, is unfair. Vehicles can be developed quickly and users can purchase and put them into service within a short period of time. Infra-structures, on the contrary, can only be modified slowly, not so much for technical as for administrative and financial reasons.

It is a great privilege to be here before you today at this lecture which honours the memory of Wilbur and Orville Wright and all that they brought to that very favourite subject of all of us—Aeronautics. I have chosen as my topic for tonight “The Role of Competition in Aeronautics”. My thesis is that competition has been extremely important in the advancement of aeronautics through the years. Much progress has come in the heat of competition. The monetary costs of competition are small and completely overshadowed by the economic benefits accruing from competition. Competition has been the life blood of aeronautics. We must keep competition alive. My objective in this paper is to stimulate in each member of this audience a strong personal belief that competition has been a major contributor to making aeronautics what it is today and a most necessary ingredient in the future of aeronautics.

It is a great honour for me to present this lecture as a tribute to the memory of La Cierva.

In my opinion, La Cierva was more than a pioneer who designed practical rotor-craft: he was, above all, the engineer who tried to understand how these machines worked and what is more remarkable, he sometimes succeeded! I am afraid that this attitude of mind has been somewhat forgotten since La Cierva, but the manufacturers willing to survive should now follow his example.

I have been asked to present the next generation of French helicopters but it would be more appropriate to speak of the next generation of Anglo-French helicopters. For, as you know, the models of the near future are being developed and produced under the terms of a co-operation agreement concluded between our two Governments. Other lecturers, with better qualifications, have already emphasised the “pros” and “cons” of these international programmes.

This paper deals with the problem of operating a large fleet of transport aircraft and managing the problems that arise from mechanical and avionic defects in the machines.

We, in BEA, for a long time made the common mistake of treating this mainly as a technical problem, requiring for its solution a thorough analysis of defect sources followed by engineering modification action. After pursuing this course for a number of years it became apparent that, although results were achieved, more important influences were nullifying the benefits. A wider analysis of the problem was, therefore, undertaken which made it clear that the primary problem was the management of ground operations at the London hub of BEA's system. At this point the effort of the three operating departments (Flight Operations, Engineering and Traffic) converged and had to be effectively integrated.

The present paper seeks to apply the ideas of discretisation to time dependent phenomena. As a suitable variational statement we may use Hamilton's principle. In practise this means that the time is discretised into a set of finite elements which are taken to be the same for all structural elements. A finite element in time consists simply of a fixed time interval. In our present discussion we detail in particular the case when at the beginning and end of the time interval the generalised displacements and velocities are given. For dynamic problems this is the minimum of information required, but the technique may easily be extended to account for additional “timewise degrees of freedoms”. Introducing an appropriate interpolation procedure we may obtain the displacement and velocity at any instant of time. It is then possible to carry out in the variational statement the time integration explicitly and to obtain hence a system of linear equations. The method is extremely simple, since the time interpolation of all structural freedoms of an element in space is the same. We also demonstrate that the general case of a multi-degree of freedoms system can be made to depend on the matrices which describe the unidimensional motion of a mass point.

One of the most interesting aspects of the aeronautical endeavours of Henson and Stringfellow was their awareness of the impact of the aeroplane as part of an overall transport system. It is all too easy in the field of aeronautical engineering to become mesmerised by the engineering intricacies of what one is doing and so fail to see the vehicle as part of this overall system concept.

In many respects we have, I think, been able to avoid this inward thinking in the helicopter since its vertical flight capability has become intimately bound up with considerations of its operational duties.

Development of the Buccaneer began in 1955, leading to the first flight of the Mark 1 in 1958 and of the Mark 2 in 1963. It was one of the first British aviation projects to operate the Weapons System Concept and to utilise the Development Batch principle.

Development specifically for the low-level high subsonic speed attack, with the requirement for maximum range very much to the fore, required a new approach. The flying qualities and structure produced for the initial design have been utilised with progressive developments in power-plant and equipment to give large improvements in performance, reliability and effectiveness at relatively low cost.

At 9.32 am Eastern Standard Time USA on Wednesday 16th July 1969 a Saturn V launch vehicle lifted-off from Cape Kennedy on the start of the historic journey that was to put the first man from Earth on the Moon.

Inside the spacecraft were three US astronauts, Neil A. Armstrong, Commander of Apollo 11, Edwin E. Aldrin, Lunar Module (Eagle) pilot, and Michael Collins, Command Module (Columbia) pilot.

I had intended to speak about passenger control, and cargo control is not really my subject. Nevertheless, in view of what has been said by previous speakers, there are one or two points on cargo matters which perhaps I might make at this stage. I should first of all say how admirably I think Mr. Leeper dealt with a number of the points raised by Sir Archibald Hope. I do not think he could have put the general Customs point of view in a better way. I was not always sure whether the speakers were referring to their experiences with the UK Customs or with other countries’ administrations and I think several of them did admit that their criticisms were not levelled against the home customs.

Frank Barnwell was a man who combined vision with practical achievement and as such earned tremendous respect. I am sure he would have enjoyed the challenge, as well as the vision, of further shrinking Everyman's World by making Supersonic Transport a commercial reality.

I am indeed honoured in being asked to give this 1968 lecture in his memory.

Right at the start I would like to pay tribute to all of my colleagues who have done a great deal of work preparing the material for this paper, and to say that without their help it would not have been an interesting paper at all.

In 1962 and 1963, the two Telstar experimental satellites were launched demonstrating the feasibility of transmitting television pictures by satellite link. Since this time, the Early Bird satellite (launched in 1965) and, subsequently, the Intelsat II satellites have demonstrated that point-to-point relay of television using synchronous satellites is an economic and a practical proposition for operational use. Many satellite systems have also been considered for television distribution between continents or between countries in a continent, or even within a country. Such satellites are Intelsat III, Intelsat IV, CETS-ESRO satellites and the Franco-German Symphonie satellites. The use of satellites for television distribution in this way solves only one small part of the television distributors problems. The largest problem is that of ensuring a good ground coverage of the broadcasting signals so that the percentage of homes which can receive television without complex aerials or amplifying equipment approaches 100%.

During the past two years the commercial airline operators and the travelling public alike have been forced to acknowledge the rapid increase in airport congestion. This problem is most marked in the North Eastern area of America at the present time but a similar situation will develop fairly soon at major airports in Europe. Even with the introduction of the airbus to scheduled services, the number of aircraft movements at conventional airports, within a given time period, will reach a maximum safe level. The restrictions are imposed partly by the large number of aircraft operations on each runway, and partly by Air Traffic Control safety limits.

For the 22nd time we are here among friends of both sides of the Channel, meeting together for an annual celebration in the memory of Louis Bleriot, who achieved the first liaison by air between our two countries.

Last year's eminent lecturer, Mr. Handel Davies, delivered a brilliant and substantial lecture on world-wide aircraft market forecast and the future progress of technical development. In his conclusion, he stressed the necessity for European co-operation.

It is evident to all those engaged in the analysis of realistic lubrication problems that none of the existing techniques of computation proves satisfactory for practical purposes. In particular the most extensively used method of finite difference approximations to the relevant Reynolds differential equation suffers from serious disadvantages. Thus, the contour of the lubrication film has to be described by constant co-ordinate lines in special reference systems, unless one is prepared to accept more or less serious inaccuracies. Also auxiliary conditions must be introduced when dealing with discontinuous changes of lubrication data, like film thickness. These and other reasons demand the development of a general method which can deal with all current practical complexities. Clearly, the finite element technique should prove an ideal tool allowing completely arbitrary variation of geometry, film properties, and boundary conditions. The present note intends to explore the theoretical basis of the application of finite elements, using a variational formulation of Reynold's equation. The various elemental matrices are formulated and detailed for triangular TRIC or TRIM-like elements.

Requirements fall into two categories: —

(i) the demands of the market leading to a capacity requirement, which, dependent on the technical solutions, leads to a market requirement in terms of the number of aircraft.

(ii) the technical requirements in terms of the vehicle characteristics required to provide the most competitive aircraft to achieve maximum market penetration.

An appreciation of future civil requirements is presented as seen through the eyes of a project engineer rather than a market research economist. The title of the symposium suggests a focusing of attention on two main fields of air transport, namely, the successors to the supersonic long-range aircraft and the large subsonic short-range aircraft. It is, however, the intention to broaden the survey to cover the major areas of activity in civil aviation, since in many ways there may be inter-relations between the developments in different fields.

The theme of this symposium is “Inter-Relations and Inter-Face Problems.” It is suggested that what are called “inter-face problems” are sometimes no more than symptoms of a failure to get priorities right. There is, presumably, an “inter-face” between a dog and its kennel. But if the dog owner wants a kennel then he gets one of the right size. The dog takes priority and no inter-face problem arises. Similarly, if someone owns a car and wants a garage for it then he has one built to the appropriate dimensions. It is only if he already has a garage that cannot be enlarged and buys a car too big for it that he is confronted by an inter-face problem but there would have been no problem had he, in this case, given first priority to the garage and bought a car to fit it.