I welcome this opportunity of following in the footsteps of the eminent and erudite speakers who have given the Barnwell Memorial Lecture on previous occasions. A number of my predecessors in this role were closely associated with Captain Barnwell. Indeed, some were included among his personal friends. I cannot make any such claim, but I did have the privilege of working in association with him for brief periods during 1936 and 1937. At that time I was, in modern parlance, the Project Officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment on the successful altitude record flights made by Sqn. Ldr. Swain in 1936 and Fit. Lt. Adam in 1937, in Barnwell's Bristol 138A mono-plane. We met on relatively few occasions but I well remember the kindly and tolerant attitude of this eminent aeronautical pioneer towards a very junior officer.

In 1959 BEA required the Trident 1 to carry a payload of 15 500 lb (7 Mg), or 75 passengers mixed first and economy class, for 1000 statute miles (1609 km), i.e. London-Rome. It was to be tightly tailored to this requirement to achieve low operating costs, and to achieve this they decided on passenger amenity standards which were below those current today. For example, allowance was made for cold meals with coffee etc., not for hot meals. First class seating was 5 abreast, and economy class seat backs were fixed with no adjustment for recline. The aircraft was to be capable of cruising at 600 mph (268 m/s), the economical speed coming out at 585 mph (261 m/s), higher than any other jet.

I learned to fly at Brooklands in the early summer of 1915, in a Maurice Farman Longhorn with a 70 hp Renault engine. Failure to take the Royal Aero Club ticket would have cost £75, but I was lucky and passed the tests in two hours and ten minutes, spread over about three weeks—no flying if it was even slightly bumpy or more than about a 15 mph wind. One had to make two figures of eight at not under 1000 ft and then land in the 50 yds circle with engine off. The sewage farm in the corner of the aerodrome, close to the railway, had a specially magnetic charm for some people, and I happily did not make that mistake.

The Eleventh Anglo-American Conference was held in London at the Royal Aeronautical Society. The technical sessions were held in the first week of the Conference, 8th-12th September in the Lecture Theatre when 22 lectures were given to over 300 delegates from 8 countries. The main themes of the conference ranged from the new generation of large subsonic aircraft and supersonic transports to the future of engine technology and advanced ideas in avionics. Summaries of the lectures were given in the July Journal, pp LVII-LXII.

At 9.32 am Eastern Standard Time USA on Wednesday 16th July 1969 a Saturn V launch vehicle lifted-off from Cape Kennedy on the start of the historic journey that was to put the first man from Earth on the Moon.

Inside the spacecraft were three US astronauts, Neil A. Armstrong, Commander of Apollo 11, Edwin E. Aldrin, Lunar Module (Eagle) pilot, and Michael Collins, Command Module (Columbia) pilot.

A very simple technique for the computation of two-and three-dimensional potential flows, based on the method of singularities, has been initiated by A. M. O. Smith and his collaborators and developed by them into a successful standard procedure at Douglas. The program assumes a representation of the immersed body by straight respectively planar facets or elements on each of which a constant source distribution is taken to act. The associated velocity field is easily established and the intensity of the sources determined from the boundary condition of zero normal velocity in the compound flow. It appears reasonable to expect a higher degree of accuracy by the adoption of a more sophisticated source distribution and the use of curved surface elements which allow a better approximation to the actual geometry. Experience in structural analysis has clearly shown that the gain in accuracy achieved by more elaborate elements increases at a higher rate than the corresponding programming effort.

The method of finite elements is in certain cases advantageous when dealing with flow problems in a finite domain. This is particularly so when attempting to include subcritical compressibility effects.

In the present note we first consider the two-dimensional flow using TRIC and TRIM-like triangular elements in conjunction with the concept of the stream function, which is assigned to the nodal points of the elements. The application of the stream function allows a direct and exact satisfaction of the boundary conditions. Strictly the elements in question could also be used in conjunction with the potential function but the observance of the boundary conditions is then cumbersome.

A VTOL aircraft which is in a state of hovering flight possesses no inherent stability of its own, consequently it may be found necessary to introduce some artificial form of control of the aircraft in both rolling and pitching motion. Such a control device may consist of an auto-stabiliser which enables the pilot to maintain the aircraft in a state of stationary hover, or to perform some manoeuvre by rolling or pitching the aircraft. This paper investigates the wing vibration problems associated with the roll attitude control of a transport aircraft in which the jet-lift engines are mounted in pods situated on the wings. Fig. 1 illustrates diagrammatically a typical transport aircraft configuration in which there are sixteen jet-lift engines mounted in two pods, one on either wing, each pod containing eight lift-engines.

Circumstances can arise in which a rectangular panel, forming part of a structure, is subject to non-uniform in-plane compression, and in which it is important that instability of the panel should not occur. Problems of this nature occur, for example, in the structure of modern highspeed aircraft subject to the transient thermal stresses that can arise from rapid changes of speed or altitude.

The phenomenon of a jet emerging tangentially to a wall and flowing along the surface of the wall has long been known as a wall jet. Plane and curved wall jets have been investigated by many researchers in the past. In spite of many investigations in this field, a reasonably complete understanding of the curvature effects on the turbulent wall jet has not been achieved. This investigation, therefore, was intended to serve as a complementary study of curvature effects. Experiments were performed with a two-dimensional turbulent jet flow over a plane surface and over circular convex and concave surfaces of various radii in still air. The study was limited to the mean properties of the flow and was not concerned with the momentum loss on the surface.