Flying is now an acceptably safe form of transport. This is obviously so because if it were not so people would not fly. Nevertheless it is a remarkable thing to be able to say. Consider for a moment what it means in terms of engineeering achievement. If you were to start from scratch to design a safe transport system would you for example

1. 1. Design a vehicle with such a light structure and such minimal factors of safety.

2. 2. Make it so that it cannot stop in a fog but has a minimum speed of over 100 mph.

3. 3. Make it so that it can cross oceans and mountain ranges but cannot stop until it gets to the other side.

4. 4. Make it reliant on complex electronic and electro mechanical devices for navigation, collision avoidance and even for control.

5. 5. Use a fuel which, according to type, has a flash point little above and sometimes actually below atmospheric temperature and which is carried in very large quantities.

One could go on listing such absurdities but these are sufficient to establish that, by all the rules, flying has no right to be safe. The fact, however, is different. Flying is many times safer than travelling by road and is, by any reasonable criterion, one of the safest of all the available modes of travel.

It is a great honour and pleasure to be invited to deliver this Lawrence Hargrave Memorial Lecture in my home town—particularly as it gives me a chance to pay tribute to a man whose contributions to the development of the science of flight are commonly overlooked and usually under-rated.

I can remember vividly Professor Stephens delivering the first of these Memorial Lectures in 1956. With his whimsical sense of humour he started in a rather unconventional way. Without any of the usual introductory words he flashed a portrait of Lawrence Hargrave on the screen and said “Well, there he is—a handsome fellow—what you can see of him.” In a sense these words sum up the theme of my lecture. I want to discuss some of the outstanding problems of the international airline industry—an industry whose handsome features are at present somewhat obscured by adversity.

The aim of this article is to describe a method of power utilisation in a man-powered oscillating wing machine and to suggest features of design, which it is hoped might be of practical value to the many man-powered flight enthusiasts wishing to engage in what might, perhaps, become a relatively cheap and exhilarating sport.

With considerable expenditure of time and resources, successful attempts at man-powered flight have been made in the not so distant past. These exercises, at or near the limits of man's physical endurance, have been rewarded with flights lasting but a short while. And it is believed that any improvement of results in the near future can be only marginal.

The local flow angles measured by incidence and sideslip probes mounted on aircraft differ in general from the free stream or ‘true’ values due to the flow field of the aircraft and of the sensors themselves.

This note describes a method of determining the correction factors by means of measurements made in oscillatory motion. The longitudinal short period mode is used for incidence calibration, the dutch roll for sideslip.

The wall jet is described as a jet of fluid which issues to a wall at an angle from 0 to 90 degrees and grows along the wall in a surrounding stationary or moving fluid of infinite extent. The plane turbulent wall jet issuing tangentially to a smooth wall surrounded by the same fluid of infinite extent at rest is known as the classical wall jet and is explained in Fig. 1.

Considering the importance of the phenomenon in explaining some of the practical hydraulic engineering problems like submerged flows from outlets and other problems like paper drying and rocket exhaust effects, it would be helpful to analyse the problem more rationally. The purpose of this note is to present a method to analyse the flow mechanism in a wall jet consistent with the physical situation of the problem.

Agricultural and forestry aviation is a service industry to the food and fibre production industries, and to public health hazard control systems. The wide range of conditions which obtain in Canada is such that a review of the state of the art and of priority problems will also serve to illustrate the current situation in many other areas of the world.

Air transport is a part of the overall transportation system and has no special mission of its own other than to serve the community by performing those functions for which it is best suited, technically and economically.

The impact of transportation on the development of world societies can hardly be overestimated. Before the advent of the steam engine, the horse on land and the sail at sea were the available tractive forces. Speed and capacity were low and transportation costs were high. Only high value goods could be hauled over extended distances. While ocean transport was often the prerogative of a national flag (remember the Navigation Laws under William Pitt—perhaps the forerunner of today's air traffic rights), local hauling activities were either performed by the users themselves or, if exercised as a trade, subject to the usual regulation of medieval guilds.