The Airline Pilot has little to do with Flight Testing for Certification, in fact, apart from a few specialist pilots in the airlines the average airline pilot takes no part in the Flight Test Programme.

Once an aircraft has been certificated, however, the airline pilot spends more time on the Flight Deck and has longer to experience the shortcomings of the Certification Programme than anyone else. He is then the Consumer, the man who spends hours with an expensive piece of machinery strapped to him and who suffers over a long period of time any cockpit design defects. For that reason a large part of this paper will be devoted to, I hope, useful criticism of Flight Deck Layouts as they affect the operating crew member.

The formation of the Steering Committee of the Management Studies Group is not an isolated manifestation of concern on the subject of management in the aircraft industry. During the past five years there have been events such as the loss of technologists to other countries, the massive cancellations of advanced projects, the Plowden Committee and many debates and ex parte statements by both the various Ministers and by industry spokesmen.

In addition to the public debate, there have been less formal meetings and approaches to the Council or the President of the Royal Aeronautical Society which indicate deep concern—almost universal—about “cost effectiveness” or, bluntly, our cost comparisons with competing aircraft industries elsewhere.

The paper outlines the existing procedures employed in the field of defence procurement and mentions some new ones which may be used in the near future. It will serve as a reminder of the way in which major aircraft and weapon and equipment projects are conducted and will lay the foundations for what is hoped will be a fruitful discussion.

When a large rocket or missile is fired, the hot exhaust gases must be allowed to escape without damaging structures or equipment in the vicinity of the firing area. Generally, the exhaust gases are directed harmlessly away from the launching installation by water-cooled deflecting surfaces fabricated in steel. In arid areas such as Woomera, where water is not available in large quantities, there is the possible danger that a steel efflux deflector will melt, and other materials such as refractories may be more suitable for the deflecting surface.

To provide data for the design of uncooled efflux deflectors, a heating rate investigation of the Blue Streak installation at Woomera has been carried out theoretically and experimentally. The heat transfer coefficient and stagnation temperature at the efflux deflecting surface are calculated theoretically with the aid of model test results. Heat transfer coefficients derived from temperature measurements on steel plates embedded in the deflecting surface are compared with the theoretical results. It is concluded that simple aerodynamic heat transfer theory can provide an effective engineering estimate of the temperature rise of an efflux deflecting surface.

In the analysis of cooled gas turbine cycles, the quantity of heat removed by the coolant is termed as “cooling loss”. In the literature, these cooling losses are accounted for by the use of either

(a) Cooling Loss Factor, or

(b) Cooling Number.

Brown defines Cooling Loss Factor (CLF) as a ratio of heat removed by coolant per unit time divided by the total turbine output per unit time.

Traupel defines the Cooling Number (CN) as the ratio of heat loss to isentropic enthalpy drop.

Cohen and Martin use the CLF in their analyses and May uses the CN.

It is the purpose of this note to give a simple correlation of the two and to suggest a new definition to account for these losses.

It has long been known that compressibility affects the maximum lift coefficient at Mach numbers as low as 0·15. A schematic flight envelope (Fig. 1) shows that there are two main phenomena to be considered; the effects of compressibility on the low speed stall, and on the high subsonic speed stall.

In the low speed stall regime there is, in general, a decrease of the maximum lift coefficient with increasing Mach number which is appreciable even at typical aircraft landing speeds. A knowledge of the lift boundary throughout the envelope is necessary if allowances are to be made for gusts and if a safe rough-air performance is to be determined.

In this final presentation in this symposium I hope to relate some of the present and future developments in computer applications to the everyday world of an engineering design office. The first engineering industry to make extensive use of the computer in design was, I believe, the aircraft industry. In the late 1940's and early 50's digital and analogue computers revolutionised the treatment of aeroelasticity and since that time the spread of computer methods of analysis and design has been rapid. Until recently these developments have been erratic and badly co-ordinated and even today there is no aircraft firm to my knowledge, either in this country or the USA, which realises more than a small fraction of the potential efficiency in design which could be provided by the computers at its disposal. In the past two or three years this fact has become more widely appreciated and I believe that the really significant steps forward are being taken at this moment. The previous papers have shown clearly the possible extent of the computer revolution in the easily foreseeable future. I hope to illustrate, through a specific example, the influence of this revolution on the activities and on the men employed in an aircraft design office.

In this paper we examine the hypothesis that aeroplane accidents are grouped, ie that individual accidents are not randomly spaced in time. While it has not been possible to find any explicit statements of the non-randomness hypothesis, it seems to be a widely-held belief. In its least precise form, the belief is that as soon as there is one aeroplane accident, there will be “several more within a relatively short period of time”. Clearly one does not expect equal or even near-equal spacing between aircraft accidents; the interesting question is what amount of bunching leads to the rejection of randomness as an adequate description of the underlying distribution. And if non-randomness is encountered in practice, how is it explained or interpreted?

The success of a project is not measured simply by the arrival in service of a product giving its promised performance. Success means the arrival in service of a product giving its promised performance, purchased at the promised price and delivered on the promised date.

To achieve these targets with a complex aerospace product requires the effective management of a large number of people, ranging from scientists through designers, technicians, managers, accountants, typists, fitters and coppersmiths to delivery truck drivers. Their efforts must be directed, each in his proper place and time, towards a single goal. The success of the project can be influenced considerably by the type of organisation adopted for the management of this wide variety of people.

A long untapered tie under tension exhibits localised stress concentrations when one end is subjected to a flexural rotation. These stress, concentrations can be avoided by tapering the tie. The optimum tapers for ties of circular and rectangular section are determined in this paper, and the resultant flexural stiffnesses are compared with those of untapered ties. Results are of interest in the design of certain satellite model support systems.

A brief review is given of the kinds of objective and subjective measurement required for systematic regulation of the aircraft noise around an airport, based on a maximum permissible noise exposure criterion. Some subjective factors are discussed and illustrated by test results.

Perhaps I should start as earlier speakers have done with a disclaimer to the effect that I am not putting my thoughts forward as those of an expert in all fields of management. I am perhaps fortunate in having been concerned with projects which lend themselves to experiments in the use of integrated management techniques, and also in the operation of a company which, because of its medium size—a thousand or so strong—and its type of business, is just large enough on one hand to justify a reasonably sophisticated approach to general management and, on the other, small enough for one to see the effects of changes in approach. It is on this basis that I shall make my comments.

Early in 1965 the Graduates’ and Students’ Section made a survey of its members to determine the effect on them of the cancellations of several major projects and, in particular, what proportion of members were likely to emigrate to continue their careers in aeronautics as opposed to taking non-aeronautical appointments in this country. Following the publication and debate of the Plowden Report, and the return of the industry to a slightly more stable atmosphere, the Section has made a further survey of its members to sample their opinions of aeronautics as a career, to find to what extent their careers were planned, and what these plans were where they existed. It is hoped that from this, suggestions of value to employers will emerge, particularly on making the careers of young engineers more interesting and worthwhile.

Measurements are presented of the amount of air which flows axially towards the surface of a disc rotating at various speeds when the nature of flow is turbulent.

The method used is similar to that of Ricou and Spalding for the case of the axisymmetrical turbulent jet. The area to one side of the disc is surrounded by a chamber, leaving a small gap between the chamber and the disc. Air is injected into this via a porous baffle until the pressure in the chamber is uniform and atmospheric, a condition which is taken to signify that the “entrainment appetite” of the disc is satisfied.

Existing theories predict the results obtained well at high disc Reynolds numbers, but give greater entrainment rates than experiment at low disc Reynolds numbers. More precise measurements are needed to substantiate these conclusions: in particular the use of a hot-wire anemometer seems essential.

I am More than a little nervous standing here, because I am the non-expert in a room full of experts, or if you will, a single sheep among a number of wolves.

I have been asked to represent the fare-paying passenger's point of view to a symposium of technical people, and as such I want to make it clear at the outset that what I am going to say is opinion, not entirely uninformed but certainly not expert. If out of what follows I am wrong from time to time, then I hope you will understand that it is not a deliberate attempt to make noise for noise sake, but is really representing the thoughts of the fare-paying passenger.

Polar aviation is a branch of flying to which the domestic British (that is excluding the Canadians) have contributed modestly. Indeed, we do not have the Arctic on our doorstep like the Americans, Canadians, Russians, Finns, Swedes and Norwegians but, in exploration, we have a tradition second to none in Antarctica, a tradition fostered and developed in bygone years so dauntlessly by men of the Royal Navy. In fact it was Captain Robert Falcon Scott who was the first man ever to become airborne in Antarctica, early in January 1902, when he went aloft near Cape Adare in an observation balloon. Admittedly he let go all the ballast at once and shot up to 800 feet so rapidly that only the mooring rope prevented him from making a free-balloon voyage over the ice-bound wastes, and he did not enjoy the experience very much. But it was a pioneering flight. A few months later, the German Drygalski made a similar flight for the purpose of ice observation; but balloons never caught on in the Antarctic and there was no more flying there until Sir Hubert Wilkins’ expedition made the first aeroplane flight, from Deception Island, off Graham Land, with a Lockheed Vega wheeled aeroplane on 16th November 1928.

It is my pleasure and privilege to deliver this lecture about the state of development of the autogyro in North America. I would like to deal with some of the early history of the autogyro, the progress of which had been steadily increasing up to the start of the Second World War. The introduction of the helicopter and the prospect of cheap transportation for all, tended to bring a temporary halt to autogyro construction. The last of the Cierva line of Autogiros was the C.40 which was a two-seater capable of a jump take-off by spinning up the rotor in zero pitch above the normal rpm required for flight, and using the excess kinetic energy stored in the rotor to achieve a satisfactory jump. Cierva's first autogyro experiments were conducted during 1922 using blades attached rigidly to the hub; the single rotor machines rolled over on take-off due to lift dissymmetry on the disc. Cierva also experimented with a contra-rotating rotor but this system was.unsuccessful, since the two discs did not behave in an identical manner.

For a simple undamped vibrator driven by a force whose frequency varies linearly with time, simple algebraic expressions are derived which give values for the maximum amplitude performed by the vibrator and for the frequency of the driving force where the maximum displacement occurs. Driving forces of both increasing and decreasing frequencies are considered.