The association of Harold Roxbee Cox with the Air Registration Board began in 1938 (the year following its formation) with his appointment as its first chief technical officer — a post to which he was eminently suited by virtue of his experience and already formidable reputation in a wide range of technical aspects of aviation. Interrupted by the war, his service to the ARB was renewed first as consultant and member of the board, later (as Sir Harold Roxbee Cox) as its vice chairman and finally (as Lord Kings Norton) as its chairman.

During the period 1970–1990 the Military Aircraft Division of British Aerospace based at Warton developed a structural sizing and optimisation system initially based on an “in-house” developed finite element analysis (FEA) system. This subsequently progressed to using NASTRAN, which was rapidly evolving to be the standard FEA system used within all divisions of British Aerospace (BAe).

The many problems associated with the development and application of this evolving system are described. These problems covered a wide range from software development, engineering application, resource management and hardware dependence.

One problems which has received a great deal of attention since 1990 is the incorporation of the panel buckling constraint particularly when applied to laminated structures. This paper describes an early attempt to incorporate this constraint followed by a brief description of the application and integration of a specialised Panel Buckling code.

The paper concludes by describing how BAe Military Aircraft Division is attempting to incorporate the buckling constraint using NASTRAN into a high performance computing (HPC) environment. In addition this development illustrates how many of the problems described earlier are being overcome by working in partnership with software vendors, hardware vendors and other business units within BAe.

The Air Registration Board came into being as a result of the work of the Gorell Committee. It was incorporated in February 1937 and started work on April 1 of that year. The chairman of the board was Sir Maurice Denny, and there was a very small staff— reflecting the limited duties given to it initially. By early 1938 these had grown somewhat — so, for example, the board was authorised to recommend changes to regulations and requirements and it also started to investigate the design of prototype aircraft (cautiously, the Air Ministry limited it to investigations of aircraft weighing less than 10,000lb.).