The paper traces the evolution of Sir Sydney Camm's Kingston Design Office through an examination of internal practices and external technical and other pressures at three Jubilee points in its history from 1935 to 1985. Some personal observations are given on the achievements of Camm and his team and an account offered of their continued success over a period of half a century.

A numerical method has been developed recently to solve the Navier-Stokes equations for laminar compressible flow around delta wings. A large-scale Navier-Stokes solution on a mesh of 129 × 49 × 65 points for transonic flow Mx = 0·85, α = 10° and Rex = 2·38 × 106 around a 65° swept delta wing with round leading edge is presented and compared with a correspondingly large-scale Euler solution. The viscous results reveal the presence of primary, secondary, and even tertiary vortices. The starting location of the primary vortex is seen to be quite different in the two solutions. In the viscous solution it starts at the wing apex, but in the Euler results it starts about one quarter chord downstream. The secondary reparations are also different, due to the up-lifting of the boundary layer in the viscous results, but to a cross-flow shock in the Euler computation. Comparison with experiment shows that the interaction between the primary and secondary vortices in the Navier-Stokes computation is obtained correctly and that these results are a more realistic simulation than the one given by the Euler equations.

A three-dimensional panel method has been used to calculate edge-suction forces for thin sharp-edged wings in incompressible flow. The suction forces have been used to estimate the vortex lift on the wings by means of the leading-edge suction analogy due to Polhamus.

The results for planar wings are in acceptable agreement with other methods based on the suction analogy. A limited comparison with results from experiments for non-planar wings revealed good prediction of lift and drag increments associated with the deflection of leading and trailing edge flaps for ‘conventional’ wings of high sweep, but only moderate agreement for a grossly non-planar configuration.