Modern aircraft, both combat and civil, are representative of the most complex “man-machine” devices ever produced and they have now been developed to the stage where, relatively speaking, little more will be achieved by the normal evolutionary processes. Increasing attention is, therefore, now being paid to new configurations, new materials and new uses of technologies such as safe automatic controls in an attempt to break through the present limits of performance, safety and cost.

One of the most rapidly advancing technologies at the present time is microelectronics and its particular application in miniature digital computers. Professor Gosling of the University of Bath recently described microelectronics as a “technology which makes negligible demands on materials and energy and yet is already changing the rules for future social evolution by making possible intelligent machines, which achieve biological orders of complexity at trivial cost”.

Sir George Cayley was a great man, many years in advance of his time and with a grasp of fundamentals which must be the envy of many people, even today. Consider the mental prowess of a man who in the technical environment of 170 years ago, where a 12 hp engine was as shown in Fig. 1, could make the statement that, “The whole problem is confined within these limits, namely, to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of air”; it is truly remarkable. It seems to me that the phrase I have extracted from that statement as a title to this lecture epitomises both the man and the subject.

Collaboration or co-operation is variously described as helpfulness, joint effort, team work, working together, sink or swim together, ‘a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together’. It implies cheerful consent and eagerness, cordiality and goodwill. All these are characteristics inherent in the human make-up. Men learnt early on that they could, and had to, specialise and share the work and that they could, and had to, trust one another. These characteristics are probably largely responsible for the survival of our species. In what I want to say, collaboration means all these things. My main theme will be that these characteristics must now motivate us to ensure the survival of aerospace research and its application to keep European aviation alive and competitive. All my remarks will be confined to research matters.

Many of the problems we have experienced in Europe in this field so far are attributable to the lateness and difficulties of establishing with users, what systems they would like to see in an operational role. These remarks, of course, relate particularly to the application satellites, and not to the scientific sector of the work, which has enjoyed a great degree of interest by the scientific community in calling for various experiments to be incorporated in spacecraft. As a result of this in Europe, we have seen through ESRO and through national programmes, a considerable degree of achievement in spacecraft which have been orbited, and which in nearly all cases have been very successful and have met or exceeded their design life. Through this work, therefore, there exists an extremely valuable baseline of experience, both in the establishments and the institutions concerned with specifying, planning, and managing the programmes on behalf of the scientists, and also in industry that has developed the equipment for these programmes.

The setbacks and frustratons encountered in the desgn and construction of man-powered aircraft are well-known. Many machines have been completed only after the expenditure of several man-years’ effort. Often, groups have reaped little reward in proportion to their labours. The majority of man-powered aircraft have suffered severe damage early in their flight career either from storage accidents, from mismanagement in ground handling, or following loss of control while in flight. The record underlines the vulnerability of these lightweight, flimsy aircraft and emphasises the difficulty in conducting safe operations while simultaneously achieving productive flying.

The two philosophies for the attitude control of flexible space vehicles that appear practicable are: firstly, the complete control of all the plant states, in the sense that all states tend to some bounded value as time tends to infinity; and secondly, to control the rigid body to lie within some bounded region and allow the vibrations within the structure to behave in an uncontrolled manner. If the former strategy is implemented, not only is the attitude of some part of the structure, for example a radio antenna, controlled to lie within some bounded region, but the modes of structural vibration are also explicitly controlled. The second method requires less state information than the first and is the less complex of the two.

The specialists called upon after the failure of a structural component to establish the true cause of the failure find themselves often in the fortunate position that they are able to tell from the fracture what went wrong. In such cases they can readily make suggestions either to improve a bad construction or to replace an unsuitable material. The consequences regarding fulure non-destructive inspection of similar components are often less readily appreciated.

The present paper deals with a number of aircraft component service failures. First, the paper discusses how inspection procedures can be improved as a consequence of service failure analysis. Secondly the paper considers the possibility that changes in existing inspection procedures may lead to unexpected defect discoveries. The third topic shows that the service failure analyst can employ standard non-destructive techniques in unusual ways with increased effectiveness. Finally it is shown that the application of inspection techniques using fluids can influence the subsequent analysis of a failure.

During the past few years there has been a surprising amount of discussion about the possibility of reviving airships. A number of schemes for new designs of rigid airship have been canvassed, all of them postulating important advances in lighter-than-air technology as compared with the ‘state-of-the-art’ at the time rigid airship development was abandoned just before the Second World War. Consideration of the factors responsible for the airship's failure may throw useful light on the validity of some of the assumptions made in recent proposals.

It is indeed a great honour and a particularly pleasing experience for me to have been invited to give the 18th Lanchester Memorial Lecture. Pleasing because it enables me to recall before such a distinguished audience, one of Lanchester's outstanding achievements in the field of aircraft stability, his phugoid theory. This slow oscillation problem has often been neglected but its implications can be vital as the Vulcan crash in 1956 emphasises, and the development of STOL with high lift has forced designers to turn again to a serious consideration of the phugoid as I will show presently in the first part of this lecture.

IN 1970, Skylab planners decided to provide the astronauts with extendible booms to convey film cassettes weighing 125 earth pounds between the Airlock Module and the Apollo Telescope Mount. This paper describes the boom and its dispensing mechanism, and discusses problems encountered with the mechanism during the test programme. These problems were mainly associated with operation in cold temperature, lubrication, and the motor/ gearhead assembly. Another set of problems which arose during crew training in the MSFC water tank is also discussed.

Experience from this programme leads to the conclusion that attention to detail is the cardinal rule for mechanisms designers. Such things as the correct choice of lubricant, the build-up of tolerances, and the effect of differential contraction of metals can make or break a design.

Two Film Transfer Booms were used during six separate EVAs over the almost nine-month Skylab mission. At these times, film for five solar physics experiments was replenished and retrieved from two work stations on the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM), and the touch of a button sent extendible stainless steel booms carrying bulky cassettes at six inches a second across thirty feet of space.

The major helicopter development activities at Boeing today centre on three programmes: the CH-47 Medium Lift helicopter (MLH), the YUH-61A Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System (UTTAS), and the XCH-62 Heavy Lift (HLH) helicopter.

The CH-47 Chinook helicopter was introduced into the US Army inventory in 1962 and has had a history of dynamic engineering development. The initial CH-47 A helicopter had a maximum gross weight of 33 000 lb; the CH-47B, introduced in 1967, had a maximum weight of 40 000 lb; the CH-47C (1968) had a maximum weight of 46 000 lb; and the Canadian Forces CH-147 (1974), a maximum weight of 50 000 lb. Our current development efforts are aimed at modernisation of early aircraft to equip the US Army fleet for operation through the 1980s.

The fuel control system for a modern gas turbine engine has to meet far more stringent requirements than demanded by early engines. To achieve greater efficiency the controlling parameters such as pressure and temperature must be measured and acted upon with a greater degree of accuracy. A 5°C change in turbine entry temperature can cause a 200 hour decrease in the life of a turbine with an expected life of 2000 hours. With increased fuel efficiency, a saving of less than 1% in fuel consumption is a vital economic factor. These higher demands can be met in most instances by mechanical or hydromechanical fuel systems but the problems of these systems such as hysteresis, friction, fuel temperatures and coefficients of expansion increase rapidly with the search for higher performance. The complexity and number of moving parts becomes greater and so the system is commensurately less reliable.

You can pick up almost any history of aviation—from the early times to the present—and read of the exploits and adventures of pilots and their planes. Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith and his Fokker, Charles Lindbergh and his Ryan, Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed. We who have technical interests in aviation know that Kingsford- Smith and Lindbergh depended on their Whirlwinds, and Miss Earhart on a Wasp, but the popular stories often fail to make that point.

In more modern times, the engines are equally vital but sometimes get overlooked. Once, when a new jet aircraft was being announced at a press briefing, an airline officer breathlessly described the aircraft, showed artists’ concepts of the cabin and flight deck, and talked at length of the systems and subsystems. After an hour-long description, he called on his audience of reporters, and then he got his come-uppance from an engine man’s point of view. A reporter at the back of the room was recognised, and asked: ‘And what is this aircraft going to be? A glider?’ The by now red-faced official had neglected to mention the powerplants.

During the preparation of this paper within the present stringent financial climate in the industry I have been deeply conscious of time and cost, since it is much more difficult these days to give the time and also to justify the cost of an activity of this nature.

Initially it was intended to examine the contribution of the aircraft designer to the improvement of those phases of the total journey over which the designer could have a direct influence. However, the organising committee had other thoughts and has requested that I should point up those aspects where, despite the efforts of the aircraft manufacturers to improve their product by reducing airborne times and real costs, many of the resulting benefits appear to have been frittered away and lost within the surface phases of the total system.

The very nature of Naval flying and carrier operations in the maritime environment has always given rise to a requirement for an efficient rescue facility during both peace and war. When safety at sea was solely dependent on surface units it was perhaps natural that a faster aerial vehicle with some form of rescue capability would eventually arrive and as we now know the ubiquitous helicopter became that vehicle.

The military requirement to save people from the sea has been with the Navy for a very long time and that lonely feeling of being by oneself in the water has raised many a heartfelt cry.

Helicopter SAR was conceived in the Royal Navy with the advent of the S51 Dragonfly in 1951. This was the first service helicopter to have a winch. During the time that helicopters were proving their worth in Korea we formed 705 Squadron at Lee-on-Solent with the primary task of developing the SAR role. Initially none of the equipment was standardised and improvisation was the keyword.

Aerodynamic heating, which is generally recognised as one of the most important aspects of the re-entry technology, plays an important role in the design of re-entry vehicles. Vehicles entering the earth's atmosphere at high velocities are subjected to severe heating. A number of methods are available for protecting the interior of a re-entering vehicle. However, preliminary studies indicate that, in general, utilisation of a charring ablator is one of the most effective thermal protection systems.

The first item in this paper is a comparative review of the history of air and underwater achievements. We shall see that commercial underwater vehicles are a recent development and offer today a magnificent challenge to engineers with many opportunities and pitfalls. Small multi-disciplinary teams of engineers are able to advance rapidly, and the calibre of a few men matters, rather than vast organisations. In some ways this resembles the aeronautical world of the 1920s and 30s, during which period R. J. Mitchell contributed so greatly. Certainly it is closer to that period of aeronautics than to aerospace today, as I shall try to show.

HM Coastguard's main function is the co-ordination of all civil marine search and rescue operations around the coast of the United Kingdom—the area limits corresponding to those set out in the ICAO SAR Plan. To achieve this task the coastguards are so disposed around our coast, on a 24 hour watchkeeping basis, to best receive the distress information and vector the appropriate rescue facility to the scene. There are 550 regular coastguards maintaining 150 regular stations (see map) backed up by over 7000 auxiliary coastguards and 214 auxiliary stations. All regular Coastguard Stations maintain watch on MF and VHF marine distress frequencies, are netted in to their local 999 emergency telephone system and are interconnected by VHF radio and telephone. All Rescue HQs and some strategically placed constantly manned stations are addtionally connected to the PO Telex system with direct lines to their adjacent PO Coast Radio Stations. CG Auxiliary stations, provided with VHF radio and telephone facilities, are only manned at times of casualty risk.

In many design procedures for calculating supersonic isentropic flow the problem arises of calculating the change in Mach number which will occur due to a specified change in flow direction, e.g. considering simple Prandtl-Meyer corner flow, it is required to calculate the final Mach number M to which the initial sonic stream will be accelerated by turning through a specified angle v.