A wide range of conflicting views has been expressed from all sides during the day. Indeed, they might be thought to cancel each other out. Altogether, it has been a most stimulating and successful occasion, even if, at times, it has seemed that some of those who have spoken have overlooked the fact that there must be airports— that they are now essential requirements for the development of our national trade, travel and economic future and that, somehow, they must meet the operational and economic needs of national and international air transport; or, as the American CAB would say, ‘public convenience and necessity’—though, sometimes, those words suggested different things on this side of the water.

Taken as a whole, the meeting seems to agree that the White Paper, the kernel of the debate, is a workmanlike, a valuable and a sensible document, which—with one or two notable exceptions—‘got it about right’. Different people have different reservations—and, all have some.

Recording devices have been used to help with the testing and understanding of aircraft behaviour since at least the First World War. Early reports to the Aeronautical Research Council reveal some most ingenious devices which were clearly invaluable in assessing the suitability of early Royal Aircraft Factory aircraft as gun platforms.

Since that time the flight recorder, in one or other of its many forms, has been an essential tool for the aircraft constructor and designer, used to establish the characteristics of the airframe itself and its ability to fly as the designer intended. The use of recorded behaviour, in comparison to that predicted by powerful digital and hybrid computers, has helped in recent years to minimise the amount of test flying required to bring a new design to operational service.

There is no general legal requirement in the UK for British civil aircraft to be fitted with an Airborne Integrated Data System. Although the Air Navigation Order requires all aircraft over 5700 kg maximum take-off weight with a Transport Category Certificate of Airworthiness to carry some form of crash recorder, this is not necessarily associated with an AIDS. However, in two areas AIDS have virtually been a requirement as part of the certification process. On Concorde the Anglo-French certification authorities produced a totally new set of airworthiness requirements to match the advanced and novel features of the aircraft. The several new and previously untried approaches to airworthiness, and the state-of-the-art of AIDS recording, caused the joint authorities specifically to require the analysis of in-service flight recorder data to validate certain certification assumptions. The Supersonic Transport Aircraft Requirements state ‘… it will be necessary … to gather, as far as possible, flight statistical data both before certification and in subsequent commercial operations. This information will be compared with the assumptions made for the application of the requirement (e.g. assumptions as regards system reliability, statistics of turbulence, etc).’