The First Handley Page Memorial Lecture, organised jointly by the Cranfield Society and the Royal Aeronautical Society, was given by His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh, K.G., at the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield, on 21st May 1963 before an audience of some 1500. The Chair was taken by Sir Harold Roxbee Cox, Ph.D., D.I.C., D.Sc, B.Sc.(Eng.), F.R.Ae.S., F.A.I.A.A, M.I.Mech.E., Chairman of the Board of Governors of the College of Aeronautics, and a Past President of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

Sir Harold Roxbee Cox said that the late Sir Frederick Handley Page was one of the greatest figures in British aviation. His was the unique achievement of creating his company in 1909 and leading it for over half a century until he died in 1962. Although always in touch with every phase of his company's work, he found time to serve the country in many other ways. They particularly remembered two of them that day. He was a Past President of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and he was Chairman of the Governing Body of the College of Aeronautics. Both the Society, and the Cranfield Society of old students of the College, wished to honour his memory by the creation of the Handley Page Memorial Lecture, and they decided to do so in partnership. In the hope of starting the series with the maximum distinction they asked His Royal Highness if he would give the first Memorial Lecture. It was difficult adequately to express thanks to him for agreeing to do so, and it was with the feeling that they were all honoured to be present on this great occasion that he asked His Royal Highness now to deliver the first Handley Page Memorial Lecture.

The idea of sweeping the wings of an aeroplane in order to delay or reduce the transonic drag rise is of course an old one, dating from at least 20 years ago. At subsonic speeds the art of swept wing design is now highly developed, largely due to research at the RAE under Küchemann on the three-dimensional aspects of the subject, and at the NPL, notably by Pearcey and Holder, on two-dimensional section design. It was soon realised that, at least in principle, the same ideas could be carried over some way into the supersonic speed range—how far still remains to be seen.

The history of the Thunderbird weapon system starts in 1949 when the English Electric Company was asked to undertake a design study for a surface-to-air guided weapon system for use by the Army for the air defence of the United Kingdom. This study gave rise to the proposal for a chemical rocket guided by a semi-active radar tracker and homing on to the target by means of proportional navigation.

A method for describing the action of a pilot in mathematical terms is presented. The method applies for tracking tasks and gives a pilot describing function which can be used in conventional servo-analysis. Flight simulator data obtained in this way for a wide variety of aircraft longitudinal response characteristics are presented and the effect of these characteristics on the pilot's action is discussed fully. In order to illustrate that work of this kind can lead to a quantitative understanding of pilot's “handling qualities” opinion, the recorded pilot opinions are “predicted” from a knowledge of three simple aircraft characteristics.

The author accepted the invitation to present this paper on the rash assumption that he would be able to present something new and useful on the tilt-wing. The Hiller Company (in partnership with Vought and Ryan) was the first to have received a fully-fledged development contract for evaluation quantities of any VTOL machine. The VHR-447 which was selected as the Army, Navy and Air Force XC-142A was a culmination of almost ten years of effort spent in the investigation and promotion of the tilt-wing “propello-plane” VTOL aircraft concept.

The title of this paper permits considerable latitude; also, there have been several previous papers on rather similar subjects. It seems best to explain therefore that the two primary purposes of this paper are, first, to bring the entire VTOL coverage of NASA's Langley Research Center up to date; and, second, to review a segment not covered in the references mentioned, namely, helicopter research. Also included are background history, and indications of the direction in which the research seems headed.

A method is described by which blades of aerofoil section can be manufactured on a laboratory scale. Emphasis has been placed upon cheapness, rapid production, and the ability to obtain an accurate representation of the blade profile for a large aspect ratio of 3·5. In addition, for a series of experiments with a cascade in water, the blades were to be made from a material which did not require the use of a protective paint on the surfaces. To satisfy the above requirements a casting process was adopted, and the blades were made from a plastic resin material. Although the discussion presented is confined to the production of blades, the method can easily be extended to the manufacture of impeller hubs, fairings, nozzles, and so on.

The friction force in many physical systems has been found to depend on a power of the velocity, the magnitude of which varies according to the damping mechanism. This note employs an approximate theory applicable to small damping to examine the free vibration of a single degree of freedom system in which the damping force is proportional to an unspecified power of the velocity.

Correlation with experimental data on the internal damping of solid materials shows that this phenomenon also tends to obey a power law although discrepancies exist between the expected and observed behaviours. These arise from the interpretation of the damping coefficient and from the frequency dependence of the dissipated energy.

On reading the paper by D. J. Bell in the February edition of the Journal, I noticed that there was no mention of an adaptation of the energy height approach to solutions of maximum range trajectories. I was surprised to find no documentation concerned with this approach and would like to indicate this technique which I have used several times.