F. W. Lanchester obtained his first technical education at the Hartley Institute in Southampton, later to become the University of Southampton, during the years 1886–89. His autobiography describes in vivid terms the primitive nature of the workshop and apparatus available. He would indeed be shocked at the wealth of modern equipment now encountered in engineering departments of a University. At the same time, no one can possibly say that this lack of equipment influenced his pioneer spirit or his extraordinary clarity of thought, not only in the fields of aeronautical and automobile engineering, but also in subjects as diverse as the musical scale, poetry and even relativity.

It is a sign of the present needs of the aviation industry that the Twentieth British Commonwealth Lecture, delivered by Mr. J. T. Dyment, Chief Engineer of Air Canada, was devoted to “Tools of Airline Management”.

In his lecture, Mr. Dyment pointed out that competition is too keen to permit Management to continue with methods satisfactory five or ten years ago and he reviewed some typical modern tools of Management. He mentioned a wide variety of tools both for the day-by-day control of airline activities, such as crew scheduling and for such strategic problems as the nurturing of the company image presented to the public. He paid especial attention to the way in which operational research in Air Canada has been able to assist Management in raising the efficiency of the airline.

In the past decade many powerplant systems have been proposed for VTOL aircraft. Of these, flight tests have shown the lift jet and vectored thrust engine to be practical and suitable for forming the basis of operational VTOL military strike aircraft. High on the list of proposed VTOL powerplant systems is the lift turbo-fan which has the inherent advantages of better hover fuel consumption, lower efflux velocity and lower jet noise. So far there has been no practical demonstration of this type of powerplant in Europe, and it is useful to look at some of the studies that have been made to compare the characteristics of the lift fan and the lift jet.

The paper compares the Rolls-Royce RB 162 16:1 thrust/weight ratio lift jet and its installation with a range of Rolls-Royce lift fans derived from the RB 162 using the latter as the gas generator.

The comparisons between the basic engines reveal the fan to have worse thrust/volume, thrust/weight and response rates. The installation of these engines in a lift pod is fully described showing the equipment required for complete VTOL powerplant. A comparison of the Installed weight breakdown for the two types of pod is made. Some of the advantage of the fans’ inherently lower fuel consumption is lost in the longer take-off transition time which accrues from the higher momentum drag of the lift fans and higher pod drag.

Looking to the future, the authors suggest fan engines based on more advanced gas generators and having a greater degree of ingenuity to minimise the weight and volume penalties.

In order to trim a supersonic aircraft in the cruise condition it is often most efficient from the viewpoint of economic performance, for which a low drag is necessary, to use a cambered wing. The camber is designed to produce a chosen load distribution, but there is a wide range of suitable distributions. In view of this freedom of choice an investigation of the variation of Cm0 with design load has been made for a particular family of cambered delta wings. The calculations show that from the range of possible design load distributions it should be possible to choose one which results in Cm0 varying approximately in some desired way. Thus In principle It should be possible to choose a load distribution which satisfies the design requirements and results in improved off-design behaviour.

If the thrust line of an aircraft does not pass through the centre of gravity, the offset will introduce a pitching moment whose variation with speed and incidence perturbations will affect the stability characteristics of the aeroplane. Both Duncan and Etkin discussed the influence of the propulsive system on longitudinal static stability, but Duncan's analysis for an offset thrust line is not correct and Etkin restricted consideration of thrust effects on static stability to angle-of-attack disturbances at constant speed. The following remarks have been written, therefore, to clarify the effect of an offset thrust line on an aeroplane's static stability. Consideration is first given to what is meant by static stability, and then the part played by the thrust term is examined.