To commemorate the great French pioneer Louis Bleriot, who made the first crossing of the English Channel by aeroplane on 25th July 1909, the Association Franҫaise des Ingénieurs et Techniciens de l'Aéronautique, better known as A.F.I.T.A., has instituted a series of lectures to be known as The Louis Bleriot Lectures. The Lecture is to be given annually and the intention is that it should be given alternately, in Paris and London, by an Englishman and a Frenchman.

The first Louis Bleriot Lecture was given in Paris on 12th May 1948, in a lecture hall attached to the Hotel George V, by Air Commodore F. R. Banks, C.B., O.B.E., F.R.Ae.S., M.I.Mech.E., F.I.Pet. It was attended by the President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, Dr. H. Roxbee Cox, D.I.C., F.R.Ae.S., F.I.Ae.S., Sir Frederick Handley Page, C.B.E., F.R.Ae.S., Past-President, the Secretary, Captain J. L. Pritchard, Hon.F.R.Ae.S., F.I.Ae.S., and by a number of members of the Society and of the Aircraft Industry.

The buckling of a round tube or curved A plate under axial compression is an example of that class of instability in which the initial buckled form becomes itself at once unstable. As a result the buckle immediately develops to a large amplitude, often with loud noise. This class of instability has been aptly termed “oil canning” from a familiar example.

Thorough investigation of oil canning problems must always be tedious. As for any buckling problem it is essential to use large deflection theory and, since the amplitude of buckle rapidly becomes large, it is necessary also to consider in detail the distribution of the membrane (or mid-plane) stresses due to the buckle. This necessity, in combination with peculiar buckled forms, renders the complete solution even for a tube extremely difficult and tedious. Moreover, since the buckled form for a complete tube does not accord at all well with the edge conditions for a curved plate, the full analysis for the latter is almost prohibitively difficult.