Thiry-three years ago, by an ironic fate, a man passionately concerned with safety in air travel, which he hoped to achieve by a radical change from fixed to rotating wings, lost his life in an aeroplane accident. Since de la Cierva's tragic death, civil air transport has grown to a spectacular system, especially if one considers the speed of modern aircraft and the size of modern airports. It is, however, still quite small by comparison with other mass transport systems, if one takes ton-mileage or passenger-mileage as the yard-stick. Indeed the penetration of the aircraft into road, rail and sea traffic has not been very impressive except across the Atlantic and perhaps on certain routes in the USA. The modern airliner with a casualty probability of the order of 10-6 per passenger flight is considered a fairly safe means of transport. Although the cost of air travel is comparatively high, the mode of travel, especially the high cruise speed, is attractive.

Although the subject under discussion refers directly to international airports, I feel I must point out at the outset that domestic airports are similarly influenced by the same aircraft development—usually, however, a little later, as anything which can be labelled biggest, best, fastest or any other commercially acceptable superlative is usually introduced into the international arena first.

As those of you who had the opportunity to read my summary will have noted, I believe that airport planning, certainly for the next ten years, will be mainly influenced by the loads carried in the new generations of commercial aircraft rather than by the aircraft themselves. To illustrate my point, I will first review the significant developments in this field during the past and then, I hope, refer in greater detail to the major factors which we have to face both today and in the immediate future.

This symposium is about Airports and Transport Aircraft and Interface problems. The best way to deal with interface problems is not to have them.

My paper is about some of the interface problems which may arise concerning a Third London Airport if we do not plan them away beforehand. The majority of the points I shall be raising were identified during our work for the Commission on the Third London Airport and are fully set out in the Report on the Commission's Proceedings Papers and Proceedings Volume VIII Part 2, Section 2, to which you should turn for more detail.

It is of some historical significance that, after 25 years or so, a body still primarily associated with the aeronautical construction industry, is sufficiently concerned with the economics of airport operation, as affected by transport aircraft design trends, to invite a paper of this sort. Naturally enough, design trends of aircraft and their effect on economics have concerned airport authorities to a lesser or greater degree for a large part of that 25 years but from their remote position those responsible for airport design and operation have seldom been able to exert any real pressures upon aircraft designers. In addition, the old idea of airports as providing a form of subsidised social service, not required to be viable, also led to a fatalistic acceptance by airport operators, at least in the UK, of the vagaries of aircraft designers in expressing their individual talents and idiosyncrasies in widely differing design criteria. However, this era is now past and many airlines are becoming aware that wide changes of aircraft design criteria can lead to considerable extra cost in areas unconnected with the pure aircraft engineering and operational environment.

The airline, if it is to keep faith with its customers, has a duty to run its published schedule with a high degree of regularity and punctuality. This calls for a wide range of interlocking activities, most of which can be affected by restrictions of one form or another. Some of these restrictions cannot be overcome by the airline's own efforts, while others are of their own making, and the airline can take appropriate action to minimise their effect.

This paper has been written from the viewpoint of a major short haul airline, whose operations are centred at a major airport (London Heathrow), and discusses three major areas of concern: Congestion; Noise; Performance.

The problem of aircraft noise has been touched on by a number of today's speakers, but I wonder how much it is appreciated that probably the biggest single interface problem before the aviation industry today is that of environmental pollution.

The dilemma which every Minister responsible for civil aviation has to face is how to strike a right balance between, on the one hand, economic and operational considerations and, on the other, the protection of the public from excessive noise. Successive Ministers have indicated very clearly to the Department that they favoured paying a substantial price, if required, for the preservation of amenity.

In 1970, at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, the value of international air cargo in and out is estimated at 5·9 thousand million dollars. That is about $16M on the average day. As in recent years, this will make JFK the number one customs port (sea or air) in the USA in terms of value of international cargo handled.

In 1969 at JFK some 409 000 short tons of international air cargo moved in and out, an average of 1263 tons or 2·5 million pounds per day. Using very rough conversion factors, this would fit into something like 500 containers 8 ft. by 8 ft. by 10 ft. This, of course, it not a real life illustration. Cargo comes in an infinite variety of shapes, sizes and weights—from massive machinery to fragile ladies’ garments on racks, from perishables to valuables.

I would like to make this talk as non-provocative as possible. I want to talk about VTOL: I do not want to compare VTOL with STOL, although it is necessary to make a comparison with ordinary aeroplanes because one must have an economic datum.

Hawker Siddeley's interest in VTOL, or more properly V/STOL, arises at least partly from experience on the Harrier. Unlike the Harrier, future civil aircraft will of course need to have multiple engines of very low jet velocity, for low noise and safety. These VTOL elements have however already been demonstrated in flight separately (on such aircraft as the SC-1, Dornier Do31 and Ryan XV-5) but not yet together. From what we know about the trends of engine technology, and from a fairly intensive project and research programme on civil V/STOL over the past few years, we have arrived at V/STOL designs with operating costs and noise characteristics rather better than those suggested by BAC. However, I think we would agree with a very great deal of what Mr. Quick has said about STOL. In our view, VTOL and STOL are by no means mutually exclusive … there is likely to be a future market for all kinds of aeroplanes whether they are STOL, V/STOL, RTOL, CTOL, or whatever.

When I was invited to deliver this paper it was suggested that I should adopt the title “Standards and Objectives for Air Safety”. I welcomed this idea because I think that now is an appropriate time to review our approach to air safety and I would like to discuss some of the modern developments in standards. On reflection, however, I felt that I should really make a small change to the title to put the objectives before the standards and I hope my hosts will forgive me for taking this liberty. I must confess that there have been many cases where the standards got written first and the objectives were worked out afterwards. But I would like to treat them here in the order in which I think they should appear.

I have been concerned for much of my working life with that part of safety called “airworthiness” but, as you probably know, it has been proposed that the ARB should now become part of a very much larger bureaucracy and so I hope my future colleagues will forgive me if I anticipate the merger with them and deal with safety in a rather broader sense.

For many space applications, it is necessary to maintain a satellite in a fixed orientation relative to the earth. Unfortunately, a correctly positioned satellite deviates with time from this preferred orientation due to perturbing environmental forces. This explains considerable interest librational stability study in recent times.

Among the numerous methods developed for librational control, a passive technique depending on the gradient of the gravitational field has gained attention. Depending on the orbital distance, environmental effects, such as, aerodynamic, radiation, and magnetic torques become significant compared to the gravity-gradient restoring moment. A need to determine the influence of these disturbing forces is thus evident.

A wing of finite span in flight generates trailing vorticity which “rolls up” into two “discrete” vortices. During the rolling up process the trailing vorticity is displaced vertically downward (assuming that the aircraft is in horizontal flight) under the influence of the wing circulation and the self-induced downwash velocities. In this note a method is presented for the prediction of the spatial distribution of the trailing vorticity during the rolling up process, thus giving the overall downwash field behind the wing.

The amount of research carried out in the field of highly swept wings has reached massive proportions. No attempt is made to review the literature on this subject but it seems that despite all efforts, no method yet exists for calculating the lift of delta wings in subsonic flow where the trailing-edge condition makes true conical flow impossible. A recent paper by Nangia and Hancock, has attempted this very difficult problem but the method proposed is not yet suitable for general application. Greater success has been obtained in supersonic flow,see for example ref.2.

Various formulae have been obtained for the lift coefficient of delta wings in conical flow and the lift can be divided into two parts; the linear part where the flow is fully attached in the region of zero incidence and the nonlinear part where extra lift is obtained from the leading edge vortices. One typical formula is derived from a relatively simple theory by Edwards.

The effect of higher turbine inlet temperature on the performance of an aircraft gas turbine engine can be quite dramatic. It can be used to increase the exhaust velocity of a dry turbojet to provide a higher specific thrust; to increase the by-pass ratio of a turbofan engine to improve its propulsive efficiency; to optimise the thermodynamic cycle at a higher pressure ratio to improve its specific fuel consumption; to reduce the amount of afterburner fuel flow in an augmented turbojet to improve its specific fuel consumption, or to increase the work output of a turbo-shaft engine. If the thrust or power of the engine is held constant, a size, cost and/or weight reduction can result. If the size of the engine is held constant growth capability can be provided.