Problems of noise at airports have now been with us for over a quarter of a century and in many ways the situation seems to be more acute than ever before. The promise of new and better sited national airports has receded to such an extent that all that remains is a vague threat of the need to find a cheaper but less environmentally suitable site, and an exhortation to permit added traffic to operate from existing airports, even though the local communities have expressed their displeasure most forcefully. The introduction of the Concorde, unlikely as it is to always meet the old noise rules, let alone the new ones, makes a mockery of those operators who are willing and have striven to accept a policy of progressive reductions of noise limits, and the present governmental tardiness to proceed with plans for retrofit will add to this unwillingness.

There can hardly have been a time in the history of Britain where a national consciousness of the importance of design to the future economic health of the nation can have been more needed. More investment, more wage restraint, a ‘fair day’s work’ and all the other matters about which we are exhorted would be of little avail if the products which we must sell to the world if we are to survive are not better, in the broadest sense of the word, and how can a product be made better if not by design?

This paper is intended to illustrate some of the new features of design management which are likely to be particularly important for the large, high technology organisations.

The two subjects that have been chosen for discussion are co-operation, both national and international; and diversification. The need to consider both of these subjects arises from the same cause; the general economic climate and the increasing complexity and cost of high technology projects. The complexity and more particularly cost mean that no one organisation or even country will tackle them alone—hence the need for co-operation.

The aim of this paper is to trace the evolution of the flight documentation of Concorde, with special emphasis on crew operating procedure, and to make some generalised predictions of the impact of recent technology on the methods of operating aircraft in the future.

The overall process of Concorde certification has been described elsewhere, the aspect with which we are concerned here being the approval of the aircraft’s operating procedures. The generation of these procedures is an involved process, one which started for Concorde in December 1967, with many possible difficulties foreseen in the aircraft operational sphere and neither of the prototypes having flown.

During the course of the preceding decade, numerous solutions to laminated plate problems have appeared in the literature. This has been the direct result of the development of new materials, e.g. Carbon Fibre Reinforced Plastics (CFRP), for the aerospace industry, where lightness allied with stiffness are characteristics of paramount importance. However, it appears that few, if any, solutions have been published for the case of plates on elastic foundations, even though such solutions may be useful when analysing the face behaviour of certain types of foam-filled, sandwich panels. In attempting to provide such solutions and to establish the effect of the foundation on the plate response, the subsequent analysis was undertaken. As a first step towards this goal, it appeared sensible to consider the simple case of a plate strip, before considering the more complex case of a finite plate. Consequently the analysis and results presented herein are restricted to plate strips.

The use of the theory of geometrical acoustics in the calculation of focussed bangs has received wide attention over the past two decades. None of these calculations however had been formulated for an aircraft manoeuvring in an arbitrary manner in a real atmosphere. Further, in most cases the results have not been presented in such a manner as to be useful to practising engineers. Recent formulation now permits the prediction of the focussing ray precisely and directly without having to compute all the rays reaching the ground from the source.