When one is honoured by the invitation to deliver the Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture one's immediate concern is to find a subject worthy of the occasion, which (in view of the wide coverage of the field of aeronautics that already has been made in these Lectures) is no easy task, at least to those of us who have no specialised knowledge wherewith to take advantage of the many new technical developments that continue to emerge.

In choosing my subject and in the attempt to draw, within a reasonable margin of error, an overall picture of the human effort that has been devoted to the cause of Aviation, I realise that I have bitten off a very large mouthful, and that some apology is due for the degree to which I may fail properly to masticate it.

On 17th December 1903 the Wright brothers started something, when by the achievement of human flight they opened the road to the tremendous developments in aviation that have taken place in this last half century. This vast and rapid progress in the technology of design, manufacture and operation of the aeroplane is today accepted as a commonplace, and its continuance taken for granted.

The main function of refuelling in flight is to increase the range, or increase the payload over long stage lengths.

The quest for range has brought about a steady increase in aircraft size throughout the years and it has now become apparent that a new barrier, the range barrier, is an even more formidable barrier for designers to overcome than that caused by increasing resistance with increasing speed, especially at the speed of sound.

Figure 1 shows the weight of record-holding aircraft plotted against distance, from the first flight, of 284 yards, by Orville Wright in 1903. By 1909 Bleriot heroically struggled across the English Channel, a distance of 22 miles, and this was followed in later years by the Atlantic conquest by Alcock and Brown in 1919, Lindbergh's solo Atlantic crossing of 1927, and so on to the more recent record achievements of the B29 “Pacusan Dreamboat” and the P2V-1 Neptune “Truculent Turtle.”

The subject of statistics is so vast that many thousands of volumes have been written on it and it would be lunacy to try to give any complete outline in a brief paper. Even by confining the field to that range of data arising from aeronautical engineering the limit seems to recede into specialist abstractions rather than narrow as generality is jettisoned. At the outset it may be well to consider these apparent platitudes because many (most?) otherwise well-informed people are dogmatic in their belief that statistics are merely applied arithmetic. No doubt the same kind of thing was said before any distinction was drawn between a tally-clerk and a qualified accountant. The assertion contains too much fundamental truth for easy rebuttal: nevertheless there does exist both a science and an art in statistics, and arithmetic is only one important contribution to the exercise of either.