The Royal Aeronautical Society may well be considered as one of the more important founders of the science and practice of aeronautics, bearing in mind at the same time the work of Sir George Cayley. Other early claimants in the history of aeronautics are the Royal Aero Club on the sporting side and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the latter known formerly as the Balloon Factory. These date back many years but so also does the Aeronautical Research Council (ARC), originally called the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (ACA), which although not so old as the other bodies mentioned above, has had an unbroken history of some fifty-seven years.

This informal history of the ARC outlines the background to its establishment in 1909, the subsequent growth and widening of its research activities for the advancement of aircraft design and construction, particularly around the two great wars, and finally its gradual decline until brought to a close in 1980. The story is told from a personal viewpoint and touches on the many personalities involved.

Plume interference effects on the axisymmetric flowfields around powered missiles are investigated using computational techniques. The study is mainly to understand the physics of the plume-induced shock and separation particularly at high plume to exit pressure ratios with and without shock-turbulent boundary layer control methods. Mass-averaged Navier-Stokes equations with the RNG k-ε turbulence model are solved using a fully implicit finite volume scheme and time-marching algorithm. The shock position and extent of separation was found to be dependent on the freestream Mach number and plume pressure ratio. Rounding the tail or a groove on the surface near the tail moved the shockwave downstream of the tail fin which should enhance the control of the missile.

The invitation for this lecture requested “a review of missile structures from the viewpoint of an aircraft designer.” This is inevitable because most of the author’s experience has been associated with aircraft design. There are however many people actively concerned with missiles who have had considerable experience designing aircraft and would be better qualified to make a more realistic approach to the subject. The difficulty for an outsider making a review of missiles is justifying the “need to know” and then, having found out, or deduced interesting facts, he may be made aware that to publish them would contravene some security ruling.

In a previous paper charts were given which related the flow Mach numbers on either side of a wave to a dimensionless wave speed. Charts were given for shock waves, isentropic expansion waves and isentropic non-steep pressure waves in a perfect gas. In this note it is shown that the lines of constant state ratio plotted on the charts constitute families of straight lines; this fact is particularly important in the case of the shock wave chart. The wave domains are also established and compared diagrammatically.

The Ground Stations to be discussed are the large Radio Stations required for a variety of Astronautical applications. The principle categories are:–

• Radio Astronomy,

• Telemetry and Control,

• Communications,

• Military applications,

The yearly accident rate is a common metric used to measure aviation safety performance on a yearly and global basis. This technical note establishes the algorithm for an adaptive moving average which can be used to trend accident rates or any other event counting type of safety indicators. The algorithm was built around the concept of Bollinger Bands and allows easy detection of significant increases or decreases of the accident rate.

The object of the present report is to make a general survey of the simple formulas and methods of calculation for the determination of the strength of thin-walled structures (plate and shell structures) which are increasing in importance in aeroplane construction, and to facilitate the study of original papers by adding a detailed list of relevant literature. an essential characteristic of the sheet metal covered structures in question is, that the metal skin in addition to the stiffening elements participates in the transmission of force. structures in which the metal sheet serves merely as a covering but which is not loaded in accordance with its strength, do not come within the scope of the present considerations. non-stiffened and stiffened plates and shells, mostly of very small wall-thickness (about 0.5 to 1.2 mm.) may be regarded as structural elements in plate and shell structures (especially shell fuselages, “ monocoques ” and wings).

The Eighteenth British Commonwealth Lecture, “Australia's Internal Air Transport” by Mr. John L. Watkins, O.B.E., B.E., D.I.C., F.R.Ae.S., Director of Engineering, Trans-Australia Airlines, was given in the Lecture Theatre of the Society on 11th October 1962. The President of the Society, Mr. B. S. Shenstone, M.A.Sc, F.R.Ae.S., F.I.A.S., F.C.A.S.I., presided.

Before the lecture Sir Roy Dobson, President of the Society of British Aircraft Constructors, presented certificates of S.B.A.C. University Scholarships to the following who had completed, or were about to complete, their courses: J. M. Chaney (Blackburn Aircraft, College of Aeronautics and Massachusetts Institute of Technology), B. C. Latter (Blackburn Aircraft and College of Aeronautics), R. A. Newnham (Handley Page—College of Aeronautics), R. A. Williamson (A. V. Roe & Co.—College of Aeronautics), D. F. Pilkington (A. V. Roe & Co.— Imperial College), R. J. G. Archer (de Havilland Engine Co.—Imperial College) and C. E. H. Joy (Bristol Siddeley—Imperial College).

Introducing the Lecturer, Mr. Shenstone said that unlike many of the lecturers in this series, Mr. Watkins had been raised in the country of which he was to speak. He had taken his degree of Bachelor of Engineering at the University of Adelaide in 1930 and then took a post-graduate course at Imperial College, London. In 1932 he joined Vickers-Armstrongs and worked on early geodetic work under Dr. Barnes Wallis. Returning to Australia in 1934, Mr. Watkins joined the Air Board, which later became the Australian Department of Civil Aviation. During the war Mr. Watkins had worked on special projects for the RAAF in the Australian Department of Aircraft Production, with the Army Inventions Directorate, and on many other projects. When Trans-Australia Airlines was formed in 1946 he was appointed Technical Superintendent and since 1953 had been Director of Engineering. One of the jobs he was most noted for outside Australia was his responsibility for choosing aircraft for TAA and also for British Commonwealth Pacific Airlines when that Airline existed as a separate entity. In 1950 Mr. Watkins had been loaned to the Government of India as Technical Adviser to the Indian Air Transport Inquiry Committee.

Mr. Watkins had been awarded the O.B.E. for his services to Australian Civil Aviation in 1958 and had been a Fellow of the Society since 1956. He was a past Chairman of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Division.

This war has been fought with machines made of wood, a most unsatisfactory material from a constructional point of view. Wood warps and cracks; is unsuitable for tropical climates; splinters easily in a crash; is liable to transfix the aviators; is non-homogeneous; uncertain in strength and weight; weakens rapidly when exposed to moisture; and is not produced in any quantity in this country.

When asked to give the de Havilland Memorial Lecture I could have taken as my subject the general state of play in aerospace research and development, with special reference to what Farnborough and its outstations were up to. Geoffrey de Havilland was a Farnborough product—a fact of which we at the RAE are very proud—so such a theme might have been appropriate. But de Havilland was not only a gifted aircraft designer, he was also essentially a test pilot. The whole rather special atmosphere at Hatfield which he created and sustained—and which still survives his death—owes much to the fact that we had here in one man both a quite exceptional engineer and an experienced and highly critical pilot who was quite capable of evaluating his own products in the air. As a matter of interest, I have reproduced in Figs. 1(a), and 1(b), pages from one of his 1911 notebooks at Farnborough which have recently come to light; even in those early days the pilot/designer combination sings out.

In a recent technical note, Squire discussed the approximate solution of certain second-order linear differential equations by the method attributed variously to Riccati, Madelung, Wentzel, Kramers and Brillouin (the W.K.B. method), and others. The problem of eigenvalues, frequently met with in this type of equation, does not, however, appear to have received much attention by this method, and in this note a simple formula is developed which appears to give excellent numerical results in many cases.