I will describe some interesting work that was done in the First World War by S. Keith-Lucas who, like many of us, had been called up from his university to work, during the war, in what is now known as the Royal Aircraft Establishment, at Farnborough.

After doing some experiments in flight, with ordinary compasses, he designed a special compass with which pilots could maintain a straight course and navigate, quite accurately, in clouds.

It was early in the war that many pilots told us that, in clouds, their compasses went all wrong and pointed in almost any direction.

To tell the story of Naval aviation from the end of the First World War to the present requires a book but, within the confines of this short article, I shall hope to trace the changing pattern of Naval aviation in this country against the background of the aircraft which were developed and used, the carriers, the catapults and the miscellany of equipment. I shall omit the technical details of the aircraft themselves, because to include them would add greatly to the length and the details are, in any case, available in the usual reference books.

It is only in recent years that aircraft have become firmly established, like tanks or trucks, as integral vehicles of the British Army. The interest of the Army in the third dimension, however, is as old as War itself, and as soon as aircraft became available the Army made use of them. In this short article we shall trace the development of our Army aviation, and deduce perhaps to what extent it has contributed to the aeronautical scene.

One hundred years of aircraft production in 5000 words leaves little enough space for a systematic treatment of any aspect! Looking back personally over 46 of these years also makes the task one of peril. First, lest one should lose friends by not including a mention of their achievements, and second, over-simplification of the steps in the historical chain leading to today.

If one looks back over the half century, or there abouts, of practical aviation, the enormous changes in aircraft and powerplants have been accompanied by an equal metamorphosis in their accessories. As soon as aeroplanes progressed beyond the stage of short hops from skids, the accessories began to develop: in the cockpit, the air speed indicator, the altimeter and the bubble levels; in the structure, the undercarriage and its shock absorbers.

In this Centenary Year of our Society I look back over the last fifty years in which I have been actively engaged in aviation. During this time the development of aircraft and now aerospace vehicles has been spectacular. It must be very difficult for younger members of the Society whose activities in aviation may have started after 1945 to visualise the intense activity in aircraft development which occurred before the last War, and which laid the foundations for the present complex aircraft.

The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, which were combined in 1918 to form the Royal Air Force, both ended the First World War with radio communication by telegraphy and telephony between aircraft and ground stations and between actual aircraft.

The equipment to achieve this was the result of research and development carried out for the Royal Flying Corps at various military establishments such as the Signals Experimental Establishment at Woolwich and for the Royal Naval Air Service, first at Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey, and latterly at Cranwell.

The celebration of an individual human birthday is an almost completely one-sided recapitulation of pleasant experiences in earlier years, together with a warmly optimistic forecast for coming years. This is wholly right and proper, although even here an occasional muted warning is of genuine value.

The celebration of a “technological birthday”, the review of the partial success, through one or more years of operation, of a man-sustained project, deserves notice of the same general type of review, promising further success, warning of potential difficulty, hoping for circumstances and facilities favourable to continued satisfaction, continuously qualified by mention of possible—indeed probable— change in the social climate, for good or ill.

This brief historical note on British rotorcraft may be likened to the small visible part of a large iceberg and the reasons for it are these.

When I was asked to write this note for the Society's Journal I agreed to undertake the task with certain reservations. In the first instance there was very little time in which to do it. While it was relatively easy to collect the early history from well-established records this did not apply to the more recent developments and here the material needed to be collected from primary sources and to be collated.

This is not intended to be a treatise on the way to investigate air accidents. That story has been told many times and there is much authoritative literature on the subject already—besides I am thirteen years out of date. My aim is to tell something about the way it began and how, in little more than 30 years, it has become a really scientific art, always keeping step with the advance of aircraft and powerplant design and yet never gaining a sufficient lead to put a stop to accidents.

Near the coast of Suffolk at a spot a little to the north of Harwich lies the village of Orford. There, from close to the ancient castle, Quay Street runs eastwards until it ends abruptly at the river, beyond which is the aerodrome and the stone and shingle banks stretching to Orfordness point and the sea. It was here in the winter of 1916–17 at the Aircraft Armament and Gunnery Experimental Establishment, that a handful of Boffins and pilots carried out a programme of research and development of gunsights and bombsights.

What, for that matter, is the meaning of Airworthiness? In the early years, aerodynamics and structural strength were the main preoccupations of those concerned with the safety of aircraft and their crews, and “airworthy” meant little more than that the aircraft was believed to be safe to fly. The wider range of safety requirements covered by the British Civil Airworthiness Requirements is the subject of another chaper. In the military field, the Joint Airworthiness Committee has introduced the concept of being “safe to meet the operational needs of the Service”.

This paper traces the development and administration of design requirements for military aircraft over the past 50 years. The period has been divided into three eras, the era leading up to the first issue of the universally known design handbook AP 970, the between-wars era, and finally the last 25 years which has been called the Joint Airworthiness Committee (JAC) era.

This account of the development of civil airworthiness comes from one who has been closely concerned. It is therefore a somewhat personal view. However, a tree in the heart of a wood must be forgiven if it knows best the trees in its immediate vicinity and if its perspective of the whole wood is restricted.

I have tended to relate the history of airworthiness to the development of airworthiness regulations, chiefly because these events are more clearly marked historically.

A chronicler of history can easily be carried away with enthusiasm for his chosen subject and as a consequence, lose impartiality. The more recent the history, the easier it is to err; and in no category of contemporary history is the danger more apparent than that of aviation. For no field of human activity has progressed so swiftly from primitive experiment and trial-by-error to a level of technical achievement surpassing that of all others.

At the end of the First World War, from a design point of view, aviation seemed to slow down compared with the tempo of progress during the war years. From the practical flying angle, there were brave efforts by a few to create flying records, such as the first crossing of the North Atlantic by air. Hawker and Grieve took off from Newfoundland and accomplished a remarkable feat of landing in mid-Atlantic and being picked up by a steamer. Alcock and Brown, in a war-time Vickers Vimy made a successful crossing, but unfortunately ended up in a bog in Northern Ireland.

Private flying dates from the earliest days of practical aviation. Indeed, for a time, it seemed that the development of aeroplanes would run parallel to that of motor cars and that these new vehicles would emerge primarily as a more rapid and flexible means of personal transport. Although the British military authorities rather belatedly became interested in aeroplanes in 1911–12 and increasingly thereafter involved themselves in their development, up to 1914 sporting, private and exhibition flying continued as a major part of aviation.

For the first several hundred years of the history of gliding, the design of motorless aircraft was attempted simply because these were, in the absence of any conceivable engine, the only possible devices through which the secrets of controlled flight by human beings might be discovered. In this short paper I do not propose to record any of the doings in this field. For as one of the most unexpected outcomes of the First World War, gliding was reborn in a shape which developed it as it is today, as the greatest sport of all time, involving the use of the energy stored in the atmosphere to maintain sustained flight.

The invitation to write, a short article on Martin-Baker ejection seats for this Centenary Souvenir issue was a real problem. Due to space limitation it will only be possible to write a sketchy outline of the vast amount of effort which has gone into 21 years of research and development in connection with this work, and so it will not be possible on this occasion to write a detailed technical paper. I think it would be more interesting to recall some of the outstanding achievements of a pioneering nature.

Although the roots of the British Aircraft Industry date back to the end of the last century—to 1898, when the brothers Horace, Eustace and Oswald Short began to manufacture balloons in makeshift premises beneath the railway arches at Battersea—it was not until the First World War that the Industry was securely founded. Thus the Royal Aeronautical Society, which this month celebrates its centenary, has existed for twice as long as the Industry.