Frederick Handley Page was, in every sense, a well-rounded man. His interests were wide—from ancient history to science fiction. They ranged through all branches of aeronautics into astronautics. And he was not afraid to show enthusiasm, tempered with a certain—proper—cynical optimism.

In the 25 years during which I knew him (from 1937 to his death, at the age of 77, in 1962) I found increasingly that one of the endearing characteristics of HP was that he maintained an exceptionally close and imaginative interest in the four main aspects of aviation in which he had been involved from his pioneering days:

• Aircraft manufacture

• Aircraft operation

• Aerodrome provisions, and

• Air education

All of these subjects are just as relevant today.

In the author's R. J. Mitchell Memorial Lecture, presented to the Southampton Branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society in March 1969, the role of aircraft in future transport systems was examined. Since that time, three important trends or events have taken place. First and probably the most important, the environmental problems arising from the use of aircraft—noise, pollution and land use—have come to be major parameters in the design of new airliners. This trend has been highlighted by the recent issue of noise regulations by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) which new airliners have to meet before they can be certificated. These limits can be expected to become more stringent in future years. Secondly, the economic effects of congestion—both in the air and on the ground, at and around airports—have begun to be felt at major airports, especially at those in the Northeast Corridor of the United States. Finally, in the United Kingdom the Roskill Commission on the Third London Airport has recently issued its report.

In a Symposium held here in November 1970 entitled “Compensation for Death and Injury in International Air Transport” we heard of the latest ICAO proposals towards resolving such liability problems as far as the airlines were concerned and there was much informed debate on the merit (or otherwise) of limiting claims arising out of an aircraft accident. It was unfortunate, but understandable, that that symposium could not be combined with today’s discussion since the basic problems are much the same. As I sought to point out on that occasion, there could be little advantage in protecting the airlines’ front door, by limiting the amount of damages available to a plaintiff, if the airlines back door was left exposed—due to the vulnerability of the airlines to a cross claim for indemnity or otherwise from a manufacturer who, more likely than not, would be a joint defendant with the airline in the same or parallel proceedings arising out of the same aviation accident. This should mean, at the very least, close collaboration between the airlines and manufacturers and, more preferably, some form of shared protection which they may create together or which may be granted to them by Government action, national or international.

I had thought that perhaps, one time I could appear here and say something without being contentious but I must immediately start off with a significant argument. I think that as a plantiff's lawyer in the United States I am one of a large number of responsible members of the Bar, and I say this in all innocence, doing a responsible job which I am sorry to say is frequently misunderstood here. I do not think we set out to bankrupt the British or American aviation industries. I do not think we set out to make fortunes for ourselves, or our clients. I think sincerely, that the objectives of the typical plaintiff's lawyer is to get reasonable redress for the poor victims of tragic accidents.

I am not attempting either to scare you into leaving early or alternatively attempting to copy Orson Welles and his Martian invasion by making this statement— because nothing of tht kind actually happened. What we can be sure of, however, is that in the course of the next decade a similar statement will be issued by the news media of the world. It may not be into the Atlantic, it may be a mid-air explosion or break-up, it may be an incident of landing or take-off. All we can be painfully certain of, is that it will happen, and we in this room today will be more vitally involved than most.

The modern jet transport has established an excellent safety record of which the industry can justly be proud, but with the airlines soon to be flying something of the order of a million hours per month, the potential exposure to accident in the years ahead is considerable.

The first 50M hours of jet flight took 12 years to achieve and—excluding the wanton destruction of aircraft in the Middle East—involved the loss of 132 aircraft and the deaths of 3800 passengers, or an average of aircraft and 76 passengers per million hours. Isolation of the past three years of this record to detect the later trend reveals an improvement to an average of 2 aircraft and 51 passengers per million hours. Given no further improvement this would soon become the average monthly rate of loss, but because of the uncertainty as to the passenger load factor in any particular accident, consideration must now be given to the realistic possibility of losing at least 20 aircraft and perhaps 1000 or more passengers in any one year. Given the validity of this concept, then over the next five years whatever dollar figure is chosen to represent the financial problem involved, the first digit is likely to be followed by nine noughts!

A great deal of research effort is going into the measurement of turbulent air velocities in relation to aircraft flight. There is a continuing need to review our knowledge of aircraft responses to air turbulence in order to appreciate the significance of the new information as it becomes available and in order to demonstrate which parameters in the problem are of most importance and therefore deserving of the closest study.

At the present stage of aircraft development we can see dramatic changes in aircraft speed, size and shape. Increased aircraft size, speed and height of operation imply larger values of the gust mass parameter μg than hitherto; they also mean that structural flexibility is becoming increasingly significant. Change of shape towards the slender configuration involves us not only in new appraisals of aircraft aerodynamics, steady and unsteady, but also in different modes of structural distortion from those typical of current subsonic turbojet transport aircraft.

Research is in progress to assess, and if possible improve, the accuracy of a widely-used method for calculating the pressure distribution on swept wings in subsonic attached (inviscid) flow. Ref. 1 does not make specific recommendations on how to deal with wings having “cranked” planforms (i.e. wings with discontinuous changes in the sweep angle of the leading or trailing edges, other than at the central “kink” fundamental to the swept wing concept); but it implies (section 8.3) that the method of ref. 2 could be used for this purpose. A re-examination of this problem, in connection with the programme of work of the Transonic Aerodynamics Committee of the Royal Aeronautical Society, has revealed errors, which could be seriously misleading, in that part of ref. 2 dealing with the thickness effect. The object of the present note is to present the corrected formulae for the basic streamwise and span-wise components of perturbation velocity due to the thickness, at and near the crank, in the simplified example consisting of two semi-infinite wing panels of different sweep angles joined together; to examine the possible singularities in the flow field in the neighbourhood of the crank; and finally to discuss qualitatively the implications of these formulae on the magnitude of the “crank effect”, including the influence of free-stream Mach number.