This article is intended to examine the Plowden Report as it affects the man in industry—is there a future for him, where will he go and what should he do? This is obviously a matter of vital importance to members of our Society and it is hoped that what follows will be constructive, although it is written in the atmosphere of an impending General Election with an apparent hiatus in any constructive thinking in Government circles on the matters which affect us most.

The appointment of the Plowden Committee was regarded by many people in the industry as an earnest of the Government's intention to end the waffling and indecision which has plagued us for many years.

Every Time I speak of “IATA” or use the term, I speak of it and its activity as a corporate body of member airlines. It is the member airlines of IATA who make and agree policies and accordingly it should be understood that it is never a separate entity.

IATA acts under direction, it is neither cartel nor employers’ association, nor is it charlatan in character. It has been maligned, misunderstood, misinterpreted, and yet there is little evidence that it has deviated from its aims and objectives—in one sentence—to ensure that all air traffic moves with the greatest possible safety, speed and efficiency and with the utmost economy for both airline and public.

In the past decade considerable attention has been given to the possibility of using self-adaptive control systems to cope with the problem of providing stability augmentation to aircraft over extended flight envelopes. On the other hand, it has sometimes been considered that insufficient attention has been given to the design of autostabilisers with fixed parameters. The authors have applied recent developments In dynamic programming to the design of aircraft autostabilisers. The methods provide a highly systematic approach to the design of multi-loop systems which is especially useful for control of the lateral mode. Furthermore, the resulting optimum multiple feedback coefficients vary little throughout the flight envelope and the use of fixed parameters for the whole of the flight envelope appears to be possible. Aerodynamic data for two aircraft were used: a supersonic VTOL aircraft and a supersonic transport.

Although I deem it a great honour to have been asked to give this lecture I will be perfectly honest and tell you that for a long time I resisted. 1964 is an important landmark in the Hatfield Branch history. It has been in existence for a quarter of a century and the developments which have taken place during this period in the Aeronautical World have been remarkable. The lecture also ranks as a Halford Memorial Lecture and so I felt that someone far better qualified than myself was needed in order to do justice to the joint occasion. However, I finally agreed and I would like you to know that this was not because some sudden inspiration gave me confidence that I was the man for the job, but rather because I felt that as the Hatfield Branch had done so much for me I should try and do something in return.

While not of the same venerable age as the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Royal Aero Club can lay claim to a respectable antiquity having celebrated its golden jubilee on 24th September 1961. Registered on 29th October 1901, the Aero Club antedated a potential rival by two days. As it was by a very short time the earliest, so for many years it continued the only, authority on the practice of the art of flying, and still reigns supreme in many aspects of sporting and private aviation.

While many of the detailed aspects of the work grew inevitably, over the years, into separate sports with their own organisations, affiliated to the parent Club, the basic responsibilities of looking after the interests and promoting the well-being of private flying in this country have never left us.

Among my collection of aviation papers and souvenirs, a favourite item is the Art souvenir and programme of the 1909 Blackpool Meeting. There, as a young schoolboy, I saw for the first time an aeroplane flying in a strong, almost gale force, wind. Bleriot's successful Channel crossing and the great Aviation Week held at Rheims had stimulated organisation of the first aviation meetings to be held in England, at Blackpool and Doncaster. It was a great treat, and an exciting experience to be taken to this meeting by my father, to see the new heavier-than-air flying machines. When we arrived at the flying ground, it had turned out a wet morning, with a strong wind.

I joined the scientific staff at Farnborough in the summer of 1915, in a very minor capacity under R. McKinnon Wood, who was in charge of the Wind Channel and Whirling Arm sections.

Now looking back to a time 50 years ago, the following names come instantly to mind: Glauert, Grinstead, Hoare, B. M. Jones, G. I. Taylor, and McKinnon Wood, and of course Miss Gilford, who sat behind glass in the office of the head of B.A. Department, always busy and helpful.

For some time Glauert and I lodged in the same house in Church Circle, and if he joined in a conversation his remarks were always worth listening to, even if he was not familiar with the subject. His comment too was always stimulating, and in spite of his brilliant intellect, he could explain in simple terms something that one had had difficulty in following.

In my boyhood days I well remember seeing balloon ascents at the Crystal Palace, which sowed the seed for my ideas of man being supported and carried in the air. Many times, when flying my kite, it passed through my mind that if, instead of holding it against the wind to keep it in an elevated position, the kite would rise and keep elevated if it were moved through the air at a speed equal to that of the wind, but this boyish reasoning into matters of heavier-than-air flying machines remained dormant while I carried on with my general engineering training.

Between the years 1905 and 1910, I took serious notice of the experiments made with gliders, particularly those by Wilbur and Orville Wright. Thus, my interest in aviation was revived, and with the experiments with engine-powered gliders, and the very early flying machines, I definitely decided that Aviation was to be my future occupation.

My First attention to matters Aeronautical occurred at about the turn of the Century, when a balloon appeared over an open space at the north of Portsmouth and a parachutist came down therefrom.

Again, I remember seeing an inflated non-rigid airship exhibited in the Victoria Hall, Southsea, made by a man named Spencer.

One recollects, also, that in those pre-motoring days, it was not unusual for errand boys, on their way in the streets, to sing some music-hall ditty.

A summary of available information on the problem of body-wing interference in supersonic flow has shown, inter alia, that a large number of theoretical methods are available for the prediction of interference characteristics. Many of these methods are chiefly concerned with the estimation of overall characteristics, i.e. normal force and pitching moment. Several methods are available to determine the pressure distribution for restricted types of configurations, but these often involve lengthy computation.

It is the aim of this paper (Part I) to summarise a simple yet reasonably accurate method of estimating the pressure distribution and hence (in Part II) the overall characteristics of as general a body-wing configuration as possible. The method which applies essentially to a cropped-delta wing symmetrically mounted on a cylindrical body, achieves reasonable accuracy without considerable computational effort; it is based on certain theoretical results together with empirical modifications. The results for pressure are generally valid up to an angle of incidence, α=6° —8° and in some cases for higher values of α. The overall normal force and centre of pressure position should hold up to α= 10°.

The Centenary Year of the Society was launched by the Honorary President, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, by his Foreword in the Centenary Journal. “The hundred years of the Royal Aeronautical Society spans the whole romantic, even fantastic, story of Man's adventure into the air and into space.”

The Annual Reports and the Journal throughout these hundred years have chronicled the story. This Annual Report —the hundred and first—records the contrasting interests of this past year: the advent of the Centenary has resulted in the somewhat nostalgic writings on the past, and considerations on the future have been caused by the Plowden Report.

Maskell has developed a theory for the blockage effects of bluff bodies in a closed wind tunnel and has shown that it gives good results for flat plates normal to a stream. For streamline bodies there are well established methods of calculating the corrections, but for long bodies with blunt bases it is not obvious what method should be used.

Despite the fact that there have been few reported instances of the flutter of circular, cylindrical, iso-tropic shells, there still remains a challenge to the analyst to derive a theory which will correlate with the available experimental data.

This note deals with an extension of the basic fin theory, as found in refs. 1 and 2, suitably modified to estimate the heat dissipated by internal structure such as consoles, floors, bulkheads, and so on. It also outlines the electrical analogy method applied to complex structures.