What is Shuttle? In a word, it is a system for saying ‘yes’ to all passenger demand. It is the antithesis of the traditional airline product (invented, strangely, by a nautical man called Noah in Old Testament times) whereby demand is deliberately constrained to fit the capacity which the carrier wishes to offer. In the case of Shuttle, the level of production is dictated by market size on the day. It is the customer, not the airline, who calls up the back-up aircraft. Demand is not inhibited — so much so that the Eastern Air Shuttle in the United States is used as ‘the barometer of national prosperity’, according to Aviation Week magazine (15th October 1979 issue). As the word ‘shuttle’ is loosely used in a variety of countries and contexts — from weaving implements to Space Shuttles — I must give the product exact definition. The British Airways version is the same as that operated by Eastern Airlines in the United States since 1961.

This paper presents first, a brief background relating the experiences and projections of Bell Helicopter Textron, to establish credibility and an understanding of the application of engines to rotorcraft; second, a discussion of helicopter powerplant and installation requirements, starting with some fundamentals of the engine size selection process and proceeding to point out some real, but often unspecified features that are needed; third, the potential of the application of advanced technology to the powerplant and to other areas of the rotorcraft; and finally the impact of the combined technologies on future rotorcraft.

It has long been recognised that in moving vehicles, if an observer wishes to study a distant object with any accuracy, the sightline along which he is looking must be stabilised against the vehicle motion. There are various ways by which a sightline may be stabilised, and for several years now the Aircraft Equipment Department of Ferranti Instrumentation Limited have been producing stabilised sighting systems for helicopters and tanks using a directly coupled gyro/mirror technique. At present we are developing systems for use in RPVs, one of which will be flown for evaluation in a fixed wing RPV research vehicle, the other under a tethered parachute.

This paper is concerned with the rolling resistance, or drag, of an unpowered pneumatic-tyred wheel rolling at high velocities in soft soil. Its application is to undercarriage design for aircraft intended to operate from unsurfaced airfields, and to the inverse problem of predicting the performance of existing aircraft in such conditions.

A stiffened panel, designed so that failure in compression will occur afterinitial buckling, suffers a loss of axial stiffness due mainly to buckling of the skin between stringers and a consequent loss of flexural rigidity of the panel as a whole. The stringers will then carry an increasing proportion of the total compressive load, provided that the stringers themselves are of sufficient buckling resistance. Failure — due either to flexural buckling of the complete panel or to some other mode of stringer failure — can occur at a load substantially in excess of skin buckling. Behaviour of this kind is commonly found in very light structures for which it may be desirable to concentrate the load carrying capacity in certain discrete members, with a minimum gauge skin in between. However, a post-buckled design may also be preferred in rather more heavily loaded structures, in an attempt to reduce the loss of efficiency in a practical design when some restriction on, say, minimum stringer pitch is imposed. The purpose of the present series of tests is to investigate the post-buckled efficiency of a particular family of Z-section stringer-skin panels, of a design representative of current practice, with a stringer pitch chosen to be close to one-third of the effective panel length.

The problem of finding the temperature and velocity distribution inside the boundary layer of a compressible flow over a flat plate is a well-known problem which has been discussed by many distinguished investigators in the past five decades.

Excellent reviews of the work done on this classical hydrodynamic problem are available, for example, in the monographs of Schlichting, Loitsyanskii and Stewartson.