SAFETY IN THE AIR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26353, 7 January 1947, Page 4

SAFETY IN THE AIR

Safety in the air is dependent on a number of factors, the most important of which are the reliability of the aircraft engaged and their suitability for. the task they are given. The coming year will undoubtedly see a tremendous boom in civil aviation, but this boom will be maintained only if it can be proved that air transportation is safe as well as swift. The average man wants to fly like a bird, smoothly and comfortably from place to place. He has no relish for the role of a herald of a new, super air age if such a role entails unnecessary risk, and safe arrival is of greater consequence to him than a few extra revolutions from the engines. Commercial aviation companies in this country, like the British Overseas Airways Corporation since its inception, have enjoyed a remarkably fine record for the safe transportation of passenger traffic, but airline operators in other quarters have not all been so fortunate. The competition to establish post-war airlines with bigger and faster aircraft has been accompanied by several grievous fatalities, and the authoritative magazine Flight (as reported in a cable message on Saturday) has been led to ask whether we have yet learned to fly our aircraft safely at 100 miles an hour. .

Speed and size are desirable attributes of any modern airliner, but they do not dispossess the essential quality of safety. Yet it is just this factor that has been sacrificed in some countries in order to produce aircraft for the early exploitation of the huge volume of air traffic that is available. The development of an airliner is a long and painstaking procedure. Five years at least must elapse between drawing board and production, and the result may then be disappointment. Fortunately for the future of the airways of the Empire, British designers have not been afraid to acknowledge setbacks, though in view of the intense demand for commercial aircraft the desire to make the best of a bad job must have been almost irresistible.

The manufacture of the 36-passen-ger Tudor II machines, designed for the Empire’s airways, has been indefinitely shelved owing to - unexpected technical deficiencies, while the necessity for improvements to the de-icing equipment has held up services to be operated by the new Viking aircraft. This insistence by British engineers on the highest standards of safety must be emulated by the aircraft industry as a whole if post-war civil aviation is to be unimpeded by a public lack of confidence engendered by frequent mishaps. It is not sufficient that the future years should be regarded as an air age; they must become an air safety age in which the ideas of designers receive thorough and' exhaustive tests before being applied to commercial aviation.