Flight Simulation has made good steady progress over the years, and is now being given significant credit for its ability to reproduce aircraft flying qualities in a device on the ground. However, the simulator world is tending to claim too much credit for its present level of achievement. This talk is an attempt to review the present state of the art against an accurate comparison with aircraft flying qualities, to highlight the deficiencies and to appeal to the users of simulators to consolidate their present gains before proceding further. This paper deals only with civil fixed-wing transport aircraft above 20 000 kg maximum weight.

Collaboration or co-operation is variously described as helpfulness, joint effort, team work, working together, sink or swim together, ‘a long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together’. It implies cheerful consent and eagerness, cordiality and goodwill. All these are characteristics inherent in the human make-up. Men learnt early on that they could, and had to, specialise and share the work and that they could, and had to, trust one another. These characteristics are probably largely responsible for the survival of our species. In what I want to say, collaboration means all these things. My main theme will be that these characteristics must now motivate us to ensure the survival of aerospace research and its application to keep European aviation alive and competitive. All my remarks will be confined to research matters.

The objective of design is the production of manufacturing drawings which are right. This objective will rarely be achieved without first making mistakes which require experiment to rectify so that design is the work of a team which includes designers who draw, development engineers and experimental manufacturing operatives.

Design must have an output which can be valued and the value of the output must exceed its costs. In the aircraft industry, the cost of design is a considerable part of the cost of the product and must be recovered directly from the customer. Because underestimating the cost of design is endemic and because some work done to obtain orders will not be successful, not all cost of design can be recovered from the customer and so some costs must be written off.

The EEC Treaty gives a good deal of prominence to transport policy. Among the activities of the Community specifically listed in Article 3 is Article 3(e)—‘the adoption of a common policy in the sphere of transport’.

There is a whole Title devoted to it, consisting of 11 articles (Articles 74-84), and the title is included in Part Two of the Treaty which is entitled ‘Foundations of the Community’. Yet on 5th June 1973, speaking in the European Parliament, the Commissioner responsible for transport (Mr. Scarascia Mugnozza) said:

‘… without wishing to detract from the progress already achieved, particularly when it is viewed in relation to existing difficulties, we must nevertheless frankly and objectively admit that very few of the aims of the common transport policy have been achieved.’

The search for new materials for use in high performance structures, such as aircraft, has resulted in the development of carbon fibre reinforced plastics, CFRP. Parts of aircraft have been manufactured from CFRP, particularly in areas where high acoustic loads are experienced. The acoustic fatigue resistance of fibre reinforced structures is therefore of considerable interest. If the acoustic fatigue problem is to be studied, the response of such structures to acoustic excitation must be predicted and for this, knowledge of material characteristics is essential.

The first stage in the investigation of structural materials is to obtain measured values of the dynamic properties. Data of interest to structural dynamicists are moduli of elasticity and damping information.