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Some Air Transportation Concepts for the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

R. H. Miller*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Extract

Throughout his career, Lanchester’s phenomenal engineering output was directed mainly towards the automobile which proved in his day to be a more suitable vehicle than the aeroplane for the practical application of the products of his genius. Aeronautics remained always a compelling avocation “wholly individual … never backed by funds from external sources”, to quote his own words. During the First World War he did contribute to the practical solution of a serious tail flutter problem on Handley Page and de Havilland aircraft, making him probably one of the first applied aeroelasticians. However, his major contributions, cited in the 1931 award of the Guggenheim medal, were to the fundamental theory of aerodynamics. The full extent of these contributions is still being explored as Dr. J. P. Jones in the Thirteenth Lanchester Lecture points out. His contributions to automotive engineering, on the other hand, were immediately reduced to practice and it therefore seems appropriate in this Fourteenth Lanchester Lecture which it is my great privilege to present, to examine whether, as we continue the full exploitation of his discoveries in aeronautics, the aeroplane will ever be able to complement, possibly even replace to a degree, the ubiquitous automobile to whose practical realisation as a safe, comfortable and reliable transport medium he contributed so much.

Type
Fourteenth Lanchester Memorial Lecture
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1971 

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