In speaking to the Air Law Group of this Society, I speak as no lawyer and offer no legal profundities. I speak as an airline man, with some experience in bilaterals. I propose to talk upon some practical aspects of bilaterals as they appear to an airline man and to touch little upon “-isms” and “-ologies”. The philosophical profundities matter only if they help an airline to trade where it wishes and to plan ahead with some hope of continuity and flexibility of routeing.

I would like first to pay a tribute to the “only true begetter” of British policy in the bilateral field—Sir George Cribbett. It can have fallen to few Civil Servants to have had such influence on the commercial side of a great industry; it must be unique for such a man never even to have reached the principal post in his own Ministry. The very qualities which made his name so revered in the world at large were probably those which blocked his path at home. Our worldwide networks of today are his memorial. In the civil aviation field his epitaph might well be that on Wren's tomb in St. Paul's Cathedral—“Si monumentum requiris, circumspice”: if you seek his memorial, look around.