It is a great honour for me to address the members of the oldest learned society devoted to aeronautics, the Royal Aeronautical Society, which was founded in 1866—six years before the Société Francaise de Navigation Aérienne of France was founded for the same purpose.

The choice of a subject nowadays is a difficult matter; great progress has been made in aeronautical science—numerous research workers all over the world are endeavouring to solve the outstanding problems—and the reason I decided to take for my lecture the subject of the maximum speeds of commercial aeroplanes was that it appears to me to be a matter of the utmost importance for the future of commercial aeronautics and for linking up the different peoples of the globe.

The MacRobertson Air Race, with its carefully thought out rules and conditions, has turned out to be one of the greatest incentives to the progress of aircraft design in the history of aviation. The fixing of the average distance between control points along the route of the race, together with the necessity for compliance with a British normal Certificate of Airworthiness, and the need for high speed all combined to make a problem for the aircraft designer the solution of which cannot but benefit very materially the advancement of aeroplane design.

Many long range records have been taken in the past, but never with an aircraft possessing a Certificate of Airworthiness. Many speed records have been taken, but few with an aeroplane which complies with Certificate of Airworthiness requirements. Here we had a contest which demanded of the aircraft the utmost range and speed consistent with the possession of a Certificate of Airworthiness.

In the early days of aviation in 1910 when Rolls, Egerton, Ogilvie and Grace were flying the open machines at the Aero Club's flying ground at Eastchurch, Grace made the interesting statement that in a few years aircraft design would develop under a continuous flow of invention in the same way as the motor car was then developing. Had Grace lived he would have been astonished at the truth of his prophecy, for the subject known at the Patent Office under the head of “Aeronautics“ has developed into one of the greatest industries in the world, and by the end of the year 1930 the abridgments on Aeronautics had become one of the stoutest volumes in the patent classification. In spite of this growth which marked out the subject for a department of its own, for some inscrutable reason the Patent Office then decided to mix up aircraft with ships and thenceforth have published these two subjects in a single group instead of keeping them separate as before that time.