The technical and the legal aspects of aircraft noise having been adequately covered by others the present paper does not stray unnecessarily into those specialised fields but confines itself largely to the practical aspects of this very wide subject. It examines under six headings what can be done in practice, and covers in some detail what has been done at Heathrow. It describes several of the more interesting arrangements at other international airports, and with reference to the differences between them, poses some questions which must be answered when planning an automatic noise monitoring system. It concludes with reference to some features which, although desirable, may not be practicable for Heathrow.

Before talking about what can be done about noise in the vicinity of an airport it is important to emphasise that worthwhile control can be achieved only as a result of co-operation between the civil aviation and airport authorities, the airlines and the pilots. Such co-operation exists at Heathrow but continuous effort is required to keep it effective.

Half a year has passed since the major airlines of the world, in a burst of energy, rallied round to “save” the Warsaw Convention. The Convention had as its principal effect a limitation of $8300 (not quite £3000) on liability of air carriers to international passengers for death or injury, and the United States had given formal notice that it could no longer accept this. The effort to update the Warsaw Convention of 1929 had, essentially, failed so far as the United States was concerned, in that the revision proposed at the Hague Conference in 1955 was only double, the Warsaw limit—$16 600 or £6000— still far below an acceptable ceiling on recoveries for accidental death caused by common carriers. The United States Senate had not ratified the Hague Protocol, it clearly was not going to, and all attempts by the United States Executive Branch to supplement the Warsaw/Hague limits—such as by compulsory trip insurance or voluntary waiver of limits by the carrier—had come to naught.

Unsuccessful attempts to obtain active service in the 1914-18 War led, in 1917, to my first serious job in aviation, in the D.O. at Handley Page, on the 0/400 and V 1500 bombers. As an eyewitness of the spectacular crash of the V prototype—just before my own first flight, on an 0400—I was sharply faced with the first essentials of air safety. Over the next 20 years, on design, strength, performance and stability investigations, flight-testing, etc. of many types of landplanes, flying-boats, autogyros and aero engines, where attainment of acceptable performance was the primary aim, the needs of safety were always much in my mind. Close involvement in various air accidents, near-drowning, frostbite, immersion in a glacial lake, mountaineering, etc., formed a valuable background to subsequent work on survival.

The past few years have evidenced a remarkable increase in the use of helicopters in agriculture. There are any number of individual reasons for this: helicopters are more plentiful, for example, but the primary reason is one of simple economics combined with a capability to meet new demands. The demands have been generated by the overwhelming population explosion. Sometimes hard to imagine and even more difficult to cope with, but the facts remain that:

1. 1. 25 % of all the people that ever existed on earth are living on it today,

2. 2. The world population increases at a rate of 5400 people every hour; and

3. 3. This staggering number of people will double again within the next 40 years.

The past decade has seen considerable advance in the production of cotton from Rhodesia and the adjacent former Federation territories of Malawi and Zambia, brought about very largely by the introduction of effective pest control measures originating from the work of the Cotton Pest Research Scheme, located at Gatooma, Rhodesia.

Complementary to a work programme investigating the type and formulation of insecticides capable of controlling an insect pest complex including bollworms, jassids, aphids and stainers, attention has been given to the design of spray equipment suited to both extensive European and intensive African forms of cultivation. The “tailboom” modification to the conventional knapsack sprayer has been developed and this versatile piece of equipment in several mechanised guises forms the basis of the recommended ground spray machinery.

The crops of every continent of the world have been devastated from time to time by locusts or grasshoppers. To mention three major locust species, the Desert Locust (Schistocerca gregaria Forsk.) has caused havoc in a broad band of the world stretching from East Pakistan to Senegal and from the Mediterranean to Central Africa, the Red Locust (Nomadacris septemfasciata Serv.) has infested East, Central and Southern Africa, and the African Migratory Locust (Locusta migratoria migratorioides Rch. and Frm.) has plagued most of Africa south of the Sahara.

What happens in one part of a plague area can significantly affect the situation in others and locust control is therefore an international problem, requiring international co-operation. Many of the threatened areas are countries where standards of living are not high and local agriculture is a mainstay of the economy; the regions are often inhospitable and lack modern roads, aerodromes and lines of communication.

In spite of more active fungicides and improved methods of application, including the use of aircraft, the control of potato blight is not very much better than it was thirty years ago. The basic weakness appears to be the impossibility of achieving and maintaining anything like a complete fungicide cover on the foliage of a growing crop of potatoes. In every season in which the weather favours the parasite a time comes when the number of blight spores is so great that many of the gaps in the fungicide defence cover are bound to be penetrated. Once a number of infections have thus been established in a crop, the progress of the disease is only a matter of time and weather, for each of the new infections normally becomes an ineradicable centre for further spread. If this diagnosis is essentially correct, the chances of major improvements in blight control with our present methods are small. It is therefore desirable to examine the history of blight epidemics in detail, to see if there is any possibility of delaying the build-up of the spore inoculum. This would give the protective fungicides a better chance of holding off the attack until the crop had produced its full potential yield.

I was in No. 2 course at Denham in 1916 and flew Longhorns, Shorthorns, Henry Farmans and Vickers gun buses. I was in the last pusher training squadron but was stopped flying before I obtained my wings. I became Navigation Officer at Heliopolis and taught aerial navigation and later went to Palestine on the same job.

I remember plenty of amusing incidents of the First World War days. For example, I was standing with General Brancker when the first SE5 arrived at Palestine airfield. The pilot forgot to close his extra air, overshot, and couldn't pick up and went straight through the line of tents (luckily we dug in about 4 ft for coolness) and a yell went up—“keep down”.