you can make it clear that notoriety and appreciation will be given in the public prints only to pilots using a proprietary aeroplane, if, in short, you can produce a general feeling against the official design,* you may be able to extinguish at one blow the official designer and the whole of the new 'spurious' aeroplane traders and builders, and induce them to return to their old business of making motor cars, gas engines, harvesters, pianos, and the like. The war has brought these firms in, and their presence has tended to defer to an indefinitely remote future the prospects of peaceful aeronautical manufacture with even legitimate profits for the accredited aeroplane trade.

The business of discrediting the official design and vituperating the official designers has been the unremitting occupation of certain writers, not exclusively in the Trade papers, for many years. They were wrong not to adopt the cleaner course of putting the situation frankly before the public. We are a business community, and none in the world can appreciate better (a) the deplorable effect of complete interruption of orders upon a manufacturing organisation; (b) the inevitableness of such interruption in the aeroplane trade when ordering is conducted on the standard methods; (c) the danger of extinguishing the makers of a vital war munition by adhering to a financial procedure which in itself is a mere precaution for economy; (d) the result of enormously enhancing prices if one adopts a procedure which causes the makers' livelihood to be precarious to the verge of ruin; (e) the anomalous effect upon a trade of having but a single purchaser during its development period; (f) the effect of sudden alterations in the quality, kind, shape, substance, etc., of the product asked for: (g) the effect, in deflecting capital from an industry, of any prospect of State competition.

The British business man is perfectly capable of understanding all this, and, indeed, he early obtained a ministerial promise that there should be no State competition. It appears that this promise was kept, and the

* 'In every case [of official design] a sample [aeroplane] was made and tried at Farnborough by some pilot who was afraid of losing his job if he said the machine was no good or dangerous' (8. 9. 15).

*

output from the Government yard of either aeroplanes or engines has been infinitesimal; only those things appear to have been made there which were unobtainable elsewhere, or were experiments, or were needed by the Trade itself.† Nevertheless the attacks went on undiminished, for were there not all the other dangers and difficulties enumerated above? Was it not, in fact, imperative to alter the direction of the Government's designers' efforts, and, if possible, to smother them with routine and repair work ‡?

As regards Zeppelin raids, the resemblance between the aeroplane trade agitations in France and England, the continued touchiness of the industry, the stimulus which these have secured in both countries from each raid, have been pointed out elsewhere. It is only lately that such raids have ceased in England to be the signal for fresh declamations against the types of aeroplanes in use in this service-an astonishing silence, considering that out of a batch of ten Zeppelin visitors only one or two have on any occasion suffered the penalty. The explanation is that out of all our aeroplane types, only those have been successful against Zeppelins which have been designed by the Government designers. § Attempts have been made to suggest that better aeroplanes should be supplied in mercy to the gallant pilots, but this proved a weak ground for attack on the designer. The pilots preferred these machines for the work. The

See the Air Board's note on the report of the Burbidge Committee. Lord Curzon said: 'The Aircraft Factory can hardly be described as having been a manufacturing concern at all,' in correcting a 'misstatement on the part of the Committee' (Hansard, 1025, vol. 22, no. 61).

+ 'I do not know how our airmen would have performed the wonderful feats they have at the Front unless there had been a supply, well filled and constantly replenished, of all the oddments required in the construction of aeroplanes which you cannot get from the Trade, and which at the beginning of the war were not to be got anywhere except at the Royal Aircraft Factory' (Lord Curzon).

Aeroplanes which had undergone serious injury should be sent to the R.A.F., assuming that Department to be carrying out its proper duties, reconstruction,' etc. ('The Aeroplane,' 5. 1. 16).

§ A seaplane of proprietary design manned by our sailor airmen finished off one of these Zeppelins; but this does not alter the general argument. The Report of the Committee says (par. 62): 'It is a striking commentary on this evidence [that against official designers] that all the three airships brought down in flames . . . were brought down by pilots flying BE2C machines fitted with R.A.F. engines.'

names of the flyers we know from the honours which have been awarded and so richly merited-Brandon, Robinson, Sowery, Tempest. The type of aeroplane used has now been disclosed, but the subsidiary devices and methods applied are of course a secret.

war.

Let us now briefly consider the question of manufacturing in war time. To borrow a phrase from 'Aircraft in Warfare' (p. 169), the whole organisation of modern manufacture depends on continuity of work. That continuity depends on a flow of orders given months in advance of their expected fulfilment; indeed they must be given some months before the time when they are even expected to be started on. And it has been stated that that flow has faltered from time to time during the This would appear to be in a measure true both from the alterations of types and the interruptions of orders. What the manufacturer wants above all is 'repeat' orders; and, of all possible orders, he would naturally prefer a repeat order for his own proprietary aeroplane at his own time and date. This is just what he has but seldom got. Let us suppose-and it is fair, because the supposition represents what occurs-that he has based his price upon the expectation that, if he is reasonable, the financial authorities will incline to repeat his orders. Then he will expect, with all appearance of good reason, that the merits of standardisation in use will secure for him from the technical authorities the repetition of orders which he desires. He lays down a special tool equipment and thereafter finds himself defrauded of that which alone would recoup him for his outlay on standardised tools and gigs and stocks of material, if any advance seriously changes the type of aeroplane or engine.

Progress in design and in methods of aerial war has been death to standardisation, and a sorrow to those who sought in repetitive manufacture rapid production with reasonable profit. The pace of progress in design has been forced, partly by the designers of private aeroplanes themselves, partly by the Government designer, partly by the discovery of new essential features by the practice of the Expeditionary Force, partly by the scientific discoveries of the Advisory Committee on

Aeronautics, of the National Physical Laboratory, and also let us not forget of certain Cambridge and other University men such as Busk, Lucas, Taylor, Hopkinson, etc., and men like Lanchester, Bairstow, and Lord Rayleigh, who have made special researches. Changes in the enemy's methods have also had their effect upon ours, and upon our requirements in material.

These alterations are not liked. It is an ill-disguised fact that rapid progress and consequently change have been anathema to the Trade' journal. Individually or collectively, sometimes by special articles devoted to belittling either the individual or the institution in question, Mr C. G. Grey and his friends in the daily press have expressed their trade feeling. The workers† are ' pseudo-scientists,' 'professors,' etc., 'experts' (in inverted commas and with an inverted meaning). The reason is not far to seek; every alteration is a cause of incredible inconvenience, a restriction of turnover, a call on the personal attention of the management, an upset of factory routine, which when reiterated becomes wellnigh intolerable. It may be wrong to blame the designer or the deviser of the new notion; he ought, perhaps, to be thanked and praised; but it is both very human and very comforting to anathematise him, though a just apportionment of the blame would leave it on those who decided upon an undeveloped type at too early a stage.

The general consequence of this progress has been that, at any given time, it is perhaps not the particular manufacturer most in need of an order to keep his wheels turning who has ready the new type design for which the new demand exists. He has a design coming on towards its critical time of test and approval, but, if he is not exactly ready, he must either be idlewhich is out of the question in war-or manufacture to the hated Government design, or even to some rival's design if the official design is not the latest and best.

The best brains have not been consulted at all' (28. 7. 1815), C. G. Grey. The R.A.F. and Nat. Physical Laboratory. . . the official mutual admiration society' (28. 7. 15); 'be-lettered scientists and the leakage of the motor trade' (11. 8. 15). Cf. note on p. 210 above.

The civilian officials engaged on design; Lord Rayleigh's Advisory Committee, the Admiralty and War Department designs; the Nat. Phys. Laboratory.

There are, of course, many other causes which lead to interruption of flow in aircraft manufacturing. Weather may delay the test of the intended type; experimental difficulties may arise at the last moment; raw material for some detail may be lacking. Any of a hundred things incidental to war, conditions of labour, etc., may occur, and have occurred, to interfere with the essential continuity of manufacture. And so it happens that, even in war, when orders flow like water, the aircraft builders are full of sorrows and worries in the present and of presentiments and anxieties for the future. From this there results the touchiness which is largely the cause of the outcries and demands of which we have lately heard so much. And it is the same touchiness which has overaccentuated our claim to air-supremacy, with a view to future business abroad, a claim followed the next moment by violent reactions of gloom, when the desire to deliver an attack rises uppermost. Once we have ensured to the Aircraft Industry an equitable and reasonable livelihood, once we have developed an instructed public opinion independent of the trade, capable of judging kindly and fairly of trade interests, we shall have given the child a soothing draught; it will forget its teething troubles and growing pains, and will develop more rapidly into a finer and healthier being than if it be perpetually subjected to nervous crises.

One parting word must be added, because its iteration is apparently essential to producing the necessary impression on the British mind. We must determine now to have twice as many aircraft of all sorts as any possible enemy. With twice as many aircraft we shall not have air-supremacy, but we shall be four times as strong; and, with four times the strength, we may be reasonably sure of blinding the enemy and of not being blinded ourselves at all by land or water. The demand for technical superiority has been highly pressed. We have, generally speaking, had this all along, but we have not established our quantity demand. Let it be two aircrafts to one, declared or not, but effectively secured from the earliest possible moment.