Brochuremanship in Britain

With jets athunder, a new de Havilland Comet III, successor to the ill-starred Comet I, took off from Hatfield, north of London last week and roared 11.440 miles to Sydney, Australia in record flying time: 24 hr. 23 min.. for an average speed of about 475 m.p.h. All Britain hailed the flight as a national triumph.

Crowed British Overseas Airways Corp.

Chairman Sir Miles Thomas: "A magnificent achievement . . . Britain is maintaining her pre-eminence in the development of civil jet aviation." Sir Miles should have known better. Since the end of World War II, Britain's proud planemakers have claimed the sky for promising new planes, only to see one after another go down as galling and expensive flops.

As a result, both Britain's military-plane program and its civilian transports are lagging far behind the U.S.

Last week, as the applause over the Comet showed, many were still playing what BOAC's Sir Miles himself once condemned as "the merry game of brochure-manship"--covering up basic deficiencies with torrents of pressagentry and hopeful prediction. Despite its good flight, the Comet III is but a prototype of a prototype that is to fly sometime in 1958, will be both slower, smaller and shorter in range than Douglas' DC-8 or Boeing's 707 jet transports.

Bugs & Bugs. The troubles of British aircraft are due primarily to inefficient planning, limited resources, inadequate research and development, slow and often outmoded production methods. Instead of carefully working up to advanced aircraft, British designers tried to make great leaps into supersonics, and crashed short of the mark. U.S. planemakers usually test every part of a new plane in metallurgical laboratories, wind tunnels, etc. before it flies. But British designers, partly because of a shortage of facilities, build a complete plane, skimp on preflight tests. On top of that, they generally build only one to three prototypes; thus when a bug is discovered, the entire test program must be halted until the fault is corrected. The U.S., on the other hand, builds prototypes in batches of ten or more.

Blame also rests on the civilian Ministry of Supply. Lacking expert knowledge of R.A.F. and airline needs, the supplymen frequently let political and economical considerations weigh too heavily. "Beyond that, the planemakers themselves are slow to improve production methods, have antiquated plants, e.g., for a long time Vickers virtually hand-built its prize Viscount airliner (TIME, Jan. 3) in converted hangars.

Hunter & Javelin. As a result, the R.A.F. currently relies on U.S. F-86 Sabre jets for much of its first-line defense, while Britain's own planes have fallen victim of one slowdown after another. Items: ¶ The Hawker Hunter, another fighter ordered in 1950, was plagued by many bugs, e.g., its engine surged or stalled at high altitude when the guns were fired.

It is now the R.A.F.'s exclusive day fighter, but is no match for the newest Russian and U.S. supersonic fighters.

¶ The Gloster Javelin, first projected in the late 19405 as a delta-wing, all-weather fighter, was so full of troubles that it will only come into general service next spring.

But the fourth crash of a Javelin, last week, will probably put back the timetable once more.

"Fly British." On the transport side, Britain has spent upwards of $70 million on a lost fleet since 1941. At first, planemakers laid their plans around huge flying boats ideal for empire routes, where long runways and well-equipped airfields were few and far between, ordered four models, including a gigantic, ten-engined Saunders-Roe Princess flying boat at a cost of some $22 million. As it turned out, big airfields were built in virtually every corner of the world during World War II, thus making Great Britain's flying boats obsolete.

The Comet disasters cost Britain upwards of $30 million. Another plane--the Bristol Brabazon--was designed to carry 100 passengers nonstop across the Atlantic, but it turned into a Rube Goldberg nightmare. Four other big airliners--the Armstrong Whitworth Apollo turboprop, the Handley Page Hermes, the Avro Tudor and the $6.4 million Vickers 1000--also had little success and were scrapped.

Viscounts & Growth. Britain has had some successes. The Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire jet engine is'so good that Curtiss-Wright makes it in the U.S. under license.

The new Rolls-Royce Conway by-pass jet engine, in which part of the air is passed around the combustion chambers directly into the tail cone, thus producing greater, more economical thrust, is highly praised by U.S. engineers. The Vickers Viscount airliner now flying on U.S. air routes has done so well that some 240 have been sold. Vickers is currently working on a bigger model called the Vanguard.

BOAC hopes to put the Bristol Britannia, a four-engined turboprop, in service across the Atlantic by 1957, fly the ocean nonstop at 400 m.p.h.

With limited resources, British planemakers are finally learning that they cannot compete all along the line with a variety of different designs, must concentrate on fewer types of planes, spend more on development and research. Says Supply Minister Reginald Maudling, currently on a tour of the U.S. and Canada, studying weapons research and procurement systems: "The British aviation industry will concentrate on developing its known successes. There seems to me to be a lot of room for the aircraft industries of both countries if we proceed in friendly rivalry."

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