For Fifty-Five years Lord Brabazon was a member of the Society, a membership he enjoyed immensely, as the membership enjoyed him.

He was born on 8th February 1884, the son of J. A. H. Moore-Brabazon of Tara Hall, Co. Meath, Eire.

When Brab was up at Cambridge he became a member of a debating society at Trinity College known as the Magpie and Stump, founded on 2nd February 1866, less than a month after the foundation of the Aeronautical Society. Its membership included many distinguished people, Sir George Darwin, Lord Baldwin, A. A. Milne and many others.

Competition is too keen to permit Management to continue with methods satisfactory five or ten years ago and some typical modern tools of management are reviewed.

The use of Electronic Data processing equipment (EDP) can be overdone but when used wisely it can be of tremendous help in enabling management to fulfil its responsibilities and to make good decisions. Many areas are reviewed where EDP has been used to advantage, including processes used for planning, marketing, maintenance, inventory, finance, personnel and on-line systems such as automatic reservations, teletype switching, etc. Although the examples represent modern airline management techniques they are also usable by many other industries.

Starting with atmospheric motions on a global scale, different categories of atmospheric turbulence are discussed. It is pointed out that the turbulence within the earth’s boundary layer is comparatively better understood than any other type of turbulence, due to a concerted effort by meteorologists and by aircraft engineers. Clear air turbulence, turbulence in clouds and storms are subjects of active research, but we are still at the beginning of the understanding of these phenomena.

The influence of atmospheric turbulence on some aspects of aircraft engineering is mentioned and the problem of the calculation or turbulence-induced loads is discussed in some detail. It is pointed out that the estimation of turbulence loads is a transposition of experience gained on one aircraft to another. The most simple technique of doing so is to assume that the atmospheric turbulence can be represented by a collection of single, isolated gusts and by making very simplifying assumptions about the dynamics of aircraft response. This technique, the discrete gust approach, in spite of serious theoretical reservations, has worked admirably well, but it appears that in many applications the limits of usefulness of the discrete gust approach have been reached. The alternative way of dealing with gusts is to treat them as a basically continuous phenomenon using the comparatively recently developed spectral technique. This technique not only permits the aircraft dynamics to be properly accounted for, but also describes the atmospheric turbulence in more realistic fashion, understandable not only to aircraft engineers but also to meteorologists and students of fluid dynamics.

Guderley, Armitage and Valentine have computed the inlet and closed body contours which form the forepart of an axially symmetric body, of given length and fineness ratio, having minimum pressure drag. The solution is not based on a simplified pressure law, such as the Newtonian impact law, because by a suitable choice of control surface for mass flow and momentum they are able to employ the general flow equations. It is clear, however, from an analysis of their tabulated results that their cowl shapes fall on a single curve for a given value of Δ=didt, the ratio of the initial to the final diameter of the cowl, when plotted in terms of a dimensionless length ξ=x/l and thickness η=y/dt, as in Fig. 1. Furthermore Fig. 1 shows that, except for small values of Δ, the Guderley shapes are indistinguishable from the optimum shapes calculated from Newtonian impact theory. The shape and characteristics of the Newtonian duct of given length and thickness, offering minimum drag to the external stream, are derived using the slender-body approximation. Ducts for which Δ > 0.04 are shown to be sufficiently slender. The slopes of those with 0 ≤ Δ < 0.04 are too large only in a small critical region near the nose. Thus slender body theory will give a close approximation to the exact Newtonian solution even in these cases. For the larger values of Δ likely to be used in practice slender body theory is valid everywhere.

It is shown that stagnation line heating rates for laminar, transitional and turbulent boundary layers measured on swept cylinders at supersonic speeds, can be correlated in terms of a Reynolds number based on the spanwise momentum thickness at the stagnation line.

A critical Reynolds number for transition along the stagnation line is determined and experimental results show evidence of transition up to M= 10.

Conditions of thermal fatigue encountered in the Aircraft Industry are usually located in engine components subjected to severe temperature and stress cycling. These components include gas turbine blading, nozzle guide vanes, flame tubes and turbine discs fabricated from a number of different materials ranging from Nimonics to sheet iron— and cobalt-base alloys. In recent years considerable experimental work has been carried out to assess material behaviour under thermal fatigue conditions and several means of testing have emerged. Rapid heating and cooling cycles using a “fluidised bed” technique have been extensively applied by Glenny and co-workers, at NGTE, and by material manufacturers to aid alloy development. Other experimenters have used axial straining devices based on expansion and contraction of heated columns followed by air cooling. One aircraft engine manufacturer has developed a thermal fatigue rig incorporating a repeated tensile axial load and temperature cycle. A further means of assessment has been developed by Forrest at NPL, in which the test specimen is strain cycled under reverse-bend conditions at constant or fluctuating temperatures.

Ablative cooling is a proven, reliable thermal protection method for entry vehicles with zero to moderate hypersonic lift/drag ratio. Unfortunately, this method becomes impractical for vehicles with lift/drag ratios greater than about 1-0, because of the severe weight penalties which accrue from long glide times and the large surface areas associated with high LID configurations. Moreover, to obtain high hypersonic LID it is necessary to minimise blunting of the nose and leading edges, a condition certainly present when ablation is used to protect the leading edges. This situation is commonly handled by the design of a high temperature radiation cooled structure of refractory metal with supplemental insulative protection in the stagnation region along the leading edges and in areas of local heating such as those resulting from shock impingement. This insulation may take the form of a high temperature foamed ceramic such as zirconia foam.

The Method employed by Timoshenko for the cylindrical bending of uniformly loaded rectangular plates with various edge conditions, has been extended for the case of pressure linearly distributed across the width of the plate.

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about the article by Mr. J. R. Cooper entitled “Future relationships between Air and Ground transport” which appeared in your issue for November, is that someone at least is ready to consider unorthodox methods of solving some of our present problems. It is a difficult paper on which to comment effectively because its does, as the author admits, embrace three separate principles.