The title of this paper may suggest that it sets out to bring the report of the Edwards Committee up-to-date. That would be an interesting and challenging task; but although some aspects of the Committee's conclusions will be considered in the light of more recent experience, I have no intention of attempting to perform, in the course of an evening, something which a number of well-qualified men, ably served by an experienced secretariat, required 18 months to complete. Nevertheless, because air transport is a dynamic industry in which change is commonplace, even the work of the Edwards Committee has to some extent been overtaken by events. Its principal recommendations have been implemented, wholly or in part, and in turn, this has set the scene for further change so far as British civil aviation is concerned. Despite this apparent emphasis on change, the industry needs stability. Sometimes stability is confused with stagnation—so let me make it clear that what is required is stability accompanied by sufficient flexibility not only to reflect change but to influence change when this is necessary.

In many ways the scene for the 1970s was set by the events of the previous decade. If there were time it might be interesting to consider some of the more important factors which have influenced the past decade, but the Edwards Committee itself examined much of the evidence of the 1960s in reaching its conclusions.

It is an honour and privilege to present this further memorial tribute to those early pioneers in the aeronautical world, William Samuel Henson and John Stringfellow. It is a very long way from their pioneering achievements in the aeronautical field and their model flying activities of the 1840s to the subject of the management of the MRCA project, an international collaborative development of an advanced technology aircraft. However, it is not devoid of associations. The fact that the Memorial Lecture is dedicated to Henson and Stringfellow is in itself a recognition of collaborative venture in aeronautics. The First Memorial Lecture was also a unique occasion in the collaboration in its preparation between the current secretary and the past secretary of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

I would like to take one quotation from the First Memorial Lecture'11, where it is recorded that String-fellow wrote to Henson on 25th July 1845 as follows:

“I received two notes from Marriott: in the one received this morning there was a proposition which I give you under and to which I believe Columbine is agreeable, that is to divide the patent interests into 12 as follows, Henson 4/12, Columbine 4/12, Marriott 2/12, String-fellow 2/12—this Marriott thinks equable and just.

In order to test a proposed design of aircraft brake, it is obviously necessary to build a prototype, lay down a testing schedule in accordance with airworthiness requirements, and then test the brake, using for example a flywheel type test machine.

The time scale involved in this exercise is quite considerable. Once the brake has been designed it has to be drawn, stressed and the paper work required to make the prototype raised. What is not quite so obvious is that in most cases of brake test the final stage or reject take-off test leads to destruction of the heat sink. Thus if the test is not satisfactory or the results do not comply with the requirements and a retest is required, then a new prototype will also be required. In the case of a large multiplate disc brake the cost of such an exercise would be considerable.

It is hoped that the introduction of a “simulator” program run on a digital machine will enable a good deal of both time and money to be saved in the evolution of a satisfactory design.

The expansion of a boundary layer about a corner is of primary importance to a near wake flow field. Experimental evidence shows that turbulent boundary layers separate precisely at the corner and methods are available for predicting such an expansion. Inviscid calculations using rotational characteristics have been successfully used. However, one of the simplest techniques of treating the expansion of a boundary layer is the method of isentropic streamtubes. Calculations with such a method may be easily programmed for digital computers or quickly done on an electronic calculator. In this note, results obtained from the simpler streamtube method are compared with results from the more complex rotational characteristic calculations.

The streamtube method assumes that the flow field is isoenergetic, the stagnation pressure is constant along a streamline, and the flow is uni-directional before and after expansion. Obviously, the boundary layer is assumed to expand without interacting with the adjacent supersonic flow. The coordinate system used is shown in Fig. 1. Y is the coordinate normal to the attached flow direction, and W is the coordinate normal to the inviscid jet boundary streamline. The individual streamlines are located in the expanded profile by applying conservation of mass to the streamtubes.

In a paper by Parsons and Cook, a theoretical solution to the initial buckling under shear stress of a long clamped plate with parallel edges, reinforced by a stiffener mesh was obtained. In the particular case when only diagonal stiffeners are present (having flexural rigidity only) one numerical solution was obtained for a particular value 1·5 of the aspect ratio of the panels of the plate associated with various values of θ, for which a partial check on the accuracy of the computational work could be carried out by comparison with results obtained by Southwell and Skan.

In this paper the numerical work is extended to cover a range of values of θ and a range of values of the aspect ratio in order to determine the optimum arrangement of stiffeners in resisting shear stress applied to the plate, that is to say the arrangement which maximises the onset of buckling.

As in Ref. 1, the cross-sectional area of the stiffeners is neglected, (he effect of a finite area of cross section being discussed in a subsequent paper.

In the 18th Mitchell Memorial Lecture given to the Southampton Branch of the Society on 3rd February 1971, Val Cleaver discussed the outlook for astronautics after Apollo.

In the light of participation in the rapidly evolving programme since that date, I shall discuss, in this lecture, the history of the Apollo project, its relation to the evolving objectives of the NASA space programme as a whole, the origins of ideas which led to the post Apollo system, the history of negotiations between the Americans and Europe on European participation in the programme, the current studies, and factors underlying possible European involvement.

The first American satellite weighed 30 lb and was launched in 1958. Since then the Americans have launched several million pounds of payload into low earth orbit and, in the Apollo programme, individual payloads into low earth orbit have a weight of 300 000 lb. NASA astronauts have spent more than 6000 hrs in space, safely flying more than 100 million miles. Eighteen American astronauts have orbited the moon, eight have left their footprints on the lunar surface.