The Council's report, our increasing membership, the eminence and wide range of activity of the new Fellows and the growing status and rising circulation of the Journal show that the Institute is making very good progress. I felt, nevertheless, as former Presidents have, that I should attempt some kind of reckoning and try to make some useful suggestions. I soon found that I could not improve on what Sir Robert Watson Watt said when he addressed us in 1950 and 1951, what he said seems all the more appropriate now. When he spoke, this country had the world's largest shipping and shipbuilding industries and a lead in the design and manufacture of the most advanced types of civil aircraft. He was concerned that we should do all we could to maintain and increase such dearly bought greatness. We could no longer afford, he said, to concentrate almost exclusive attention on the big 10 to 20 per cent factors which govern overall efficiency in such industries, and must give a greater share than before to the small 1 to 5 per cent factors. These, he pointed out, were mainly advances in the arts and sciences on which navigation depends for its full usefulness, and on which navigators depend more or less consciously in making their decisions. They generally advance with the help of new methods and practices which, though at first too novel or too elaborate for ordinary use, become commonplace before long.

The Transit navigation satellite system, scheduled to become operational in the near future, has been publicized sufficiently for its main features to be rather well known. The excellent article by Dr. R. B. Kershner and Dr. R. R. Newton in the April 1962 issue of this Journal provides a particularly thorough description of the system. In the same issue, Dr. H. C. Freiesleben gives a clear summary of the principal alternative solutions to the navigation satellite problem.

Rule 25 of the Collision Regulations lays down that, when it is safe and practicable, ships in narrow channels shall keep to the starboard side. The idea behind routing is to extend this type of organization to areas where, because of the concentration of traffic, the problem begins to resemble that of narrow channels. In the open sea a busy route presents no great problem. But where shipping lanes converge the collision problem often becomes serious. This is to a large extent a modern problem which has arisen not only with the increase in maritime traffic, but also with the ability of ships to navigate where they will. Further, the average speed of ships, in all conditions, has greatly increased.

However misleading statistics may be, they often make an interesting study and those of marine collisions are no exception. In Volume 13 of this Journal, page 430, some figures were given for collisions in fog with radar, which permitted the conclusion that, in North-west European waters in 1959, each day of fog produced 1·2 collisions. Up to and including 1959 this figure was not rising significantly.

For a long time, in countries where the tides show a large rise and fall in certain waters, thought has been devoted to the exploitation of the power brought into action by this phenomenon. Anyone interested in the problem will be familiar with the names of Passamaquoddy, Cobscook, Petit-Codiac, San José and Mezen bays, and the Severn, Abervrach and Ranee estuaries. All these stretches of water have been, as some still are, the subject of investigations carried to very different stages, with a view to building barrages to hold the water brought up by the tide, and plants to collect power from its return.

If a radar transmitter and receiver are mounted together in the nose of an aircraft and flown at speed V over flat ground towards a vertical reflector (Fig. 1), then the received signal at the reflector differs in frequency from the transmitted signal by + V/λ (the doppler frequency), where λ is the wavelength of the transmitter. The reflected signal back to the aircraft undergoes a further increase of frequency + V/λ, thus the received signal at the aircraft differs from the transmitted frequency by + 2V/λ. This difference in frequency, referred to as the doppler shift, is proportional to the speed of the aircraft.

It is now more than thirteen years since experimental work first started in Australia on controlled height/distance paths using radar distance and barometric height. At that time, however, the effectiveness of such a system was limited since no suitable altimeter with an electrical output existed, and since the number of radio beacons in existence was much smaller than at present. With the advent of more suitable altimeters, and now that distance measuring equipment (DME) is mandatory for all passenger carrying aircraft in Australia, work has been resumed and further trials have recently been carried out.

Each navigational aid has its advantages and disadvantages and for that reason the optimum aid will be a combination of several aids. The best way of combining the aids seems to be by means of an automatic dead reckoning computer which continuously computes position from true air-speed and wind-speed and other data which can be fed into the existing navigational aids by means of a data transformer. Data from the integrated system can be transmitted by data link to air traffic control to correct the flight programme, &c. This paper, which was presented at Dusseldorf at the German Navigation Society's meeting (5–7 June 1962), surveys the field of integrated navigation systems and describes a number of possibilities. Formulae are derived for the accuracy of Vortac and D.R. and Vortac and doppler. It is published with the kind permission of the German Navigation Society.

If we look critically at the navigational aids which are available today we find that all have advantages and disadvantages, and that no one aid can be claimed to be suitable for all purposes. This situation will still exist for many years. Therefore it seems very advantageous to combine the available navigational aids to form an integrated navigation system in such a way that the possibilities may be fully utilized.

Accepting the technical fact of automatic landing, an examination is made of the basic human problems in its application to commercial air transport. This examination starts with an analysis of the use of human operators and automatic machines applied to operational tasks. Consideration is given to both control and monitoring functions, and conclusions are drawn about the correct approach to man/machine system design.

The required standard of safety for commercial automatic landing is briefly reviewed, with particular reference to the official British attitude. It is shown that automatic landing can be a tool for improving safety in future. The role of the pilot is considered. It is concluded that there is no real conflict between man and machine: that the automatic system will not affect the crew complement, or the basic responsibilities of an airline pilot: and that the potential of automatic systems can only be realized by a proper understanding of their true implications.

The original paper, of which this is an abbreviated version, was presented at the Institute of Aerospace Sciences National Meeting held in Seattle, Washington, on 10 and 11 August 1962.

Automatic landing systems are already in full production in Britain for Bomber and Transport aircraft of the Royal Air Force, and many thousands of successful landings have been made in both jet and propeller driven aircraft in all sorts of weather conditions. Second generation equipment is now clearing the prototype stage and entering production for application to passenger carrying aircraft at a civil standard of safety. This equipment is destined initially for application to the De Havilland Trident for British European Airways, and to the Short Belfast heavy transport for the Royal Air Force.

Recent correspondence in the Shipping Press brings to mind many of the sayings, writings and judgments of the last 10 years and stimulates thought once more in search of some basic weakness in the partnership between the seaman and his radar which, all too often, turns the risk of collision into the fact. Re-examination of the circumstances of some of the better annotated and sometimes more publicized cases is frustrating, partly because of the lack of personal detail in the evidence and partly because some of the conclusions which may be drawn point to failure of bridge personnel to understand the obvious fundamentals and so suggest that there must be undisclosed and more complicated causes. This latter, it is believed, is debatable.