100/75... heading
100/75/50/25 - text. style
for the text for each of the
four historical
arreas. The year
logo sits at the
beginning of the
third line of main text. The
texts do not have to be the
same length each week.100/75... heading
100/75/50/25 - text. style
for the text for each of the
four historical
arreas. The year
logo sits at the
beginning of the
third line of main text. The
texts do not have to be the
same length each week.100/75... heading
100/75/50/25 - text. style
for the text for each of the
four historical
arreas. The year
logo sits at the
beginning of the
third line of main text. The
texts do not have to be the
same length each week.100/75... heading
100/75/50/25 - text. style
for the text for each of the
four historical
arreas. The year
logo sits at the
beginning of the
third line of main text. The
texts do not have to be the
same length each week.STRAIGHT&LEVEL
From yuckspeak to tales of yore, send your offcuts to [email protected]
100-YEAR ARCHIVE
Every issue of Flight
from 1909 onwards
can be viewed online at
flightglobal.com/archive36 | Flight International | 5-11 June 2018 flightglobal.com
‘Siege by air’
In a recent leading article
under the heading quoted
above, the Mail
dwells on what it
describes as the
coming siege of
Germany by air. As it
remarks, the immense
power of aircraft, which
hitherto was visible only to
the eye of faith, is now to be
demonstrated in the field.Wind tunnel
A high-speed wind tunnel
and aeronautical research
laboratory is
nearing
completion at
the Boeing plant
at Seattle. As a memorial to
the late Edmund T. Allen,
their director of flight and
aerodynamics, the research
centre, which he planned,
will be named after him.Glider tournament
Leszno will be the site of the
biggest gliding champion-
ships ever: 106
gliders from 32
nations have
been entered.
The grass airfield has been
extended since the World
Championships of 1958, and
there is now permanent
accommodation, instead of
tents, for over 100 pilots.Hubble mission
Seven astronauts aboard
the Endeavour, flying the
STS61 mission,
will attempt to
service and
repair the
Lockheed-built, $1.4 billion
Hubble Space Telescope.
The mission was always
planned, as a series of five
routine-servicing flights.REX/ShutterstockA not-so-super acronym
BoJo’s flying
Foreign Office
Now that our small island in the
Atlantic is poised to return to its
glory days as one of the world’s
economic and political
superpowers, foreign secretary
Boris Johnson has suggested that
he needs his own business jet to
help forge the country’s new
global relationships.
But doesn’t Her Majesty’s
Government have an official
head of state transport, the
Royal Air Force’s Airbus A330
Voyager? Ah, but the trouble
with that is it’s rarely available,
complained Boris during a trip
to Buenos Aires. What’s more,
it’s the wrong colour: “Why does
it have to be grey?” he asks.
BoJo is famous for his claim
during the Brexit debate that EU
membership was costing
hundreds of millions of pounds
a week that could be spent on
the health service. He
acknowledges that “the
taxpayers won’t want us to have
some luxurious new plane, but I
certainly think it’s striking that
we don’t seem to have access to
such a thing at the moment”.
Of the Voyager, he says: “I
don’t know who uses it, but it
never seems to be available.”
But what to name the new
Foreign Office flagship? BoJoJet?
Brexit Express? We would opt
for Hair Force One, but we think
President Trump has claimed
that one.
HIT storm
Our colleague Stephen Trimble
unearths this marketing give-
away, and says: “I love swag that
reminds me of that time when
nobody thought of the acronym
implications for the Hornet
Industry Team when they added
the Super variant.”
choppers’ role in the nation’s
defence: “They were designed
to stop an invasion through
Trieste. We had 60 of them: they
would have delayed the
collapse of our country by about
an hour and a half.”
In Italy, isn’t that usually the
job of a general election?Boeing’s trade
war of words
Interpreting what the World
Trade Organization is actually
saying is never easy, but the
extent to which the same set of
words can be spun in different
ways is highlighted in a tweet
from Boeing after the watchdog’s
most recent finding on state
support for aircraft programmes.
It posts a screengrab of a
Reuters headline: “WTO rules
that EU failed to remove all
Airbus subsidies”.
Alongside it, it puts its arch-
rival’s official interpretation of
the announcement: “WTO
confirmed: no prohibited
subsidies at Airbus, minor
elements of actionable subsidies
to be addressed.”
The US airframer notes wryly:
“Dear friends at @Airbus, are
you reading the same ruling?”Biz av 1927-style
On the subject of VIP aircraft
and with the EBACE gathering
in Geneva having just taken
place, our attention has been
drawn to an article from our
own archives from 1927.
It details how oil company
Shell-Mex had taken delivery of
one of the UK’s first corporate
aircraft, a two-seat de Havilland
Moth, from the company’s Stag
Lane aerodrome site.
A Jerry Shaw, manager of
Shell-Mex’s aviation
department, planned to use the
Moth on business flights around
the UK “and even abroad”.
It was, we postulated, an
example of “the smaller type of
aeroplane such as might be used
privately by business houses
and not the large machines used
on established air routes”.
Executives saving time by
avoiding commercial airlines
and flying direct on company-
owned aircraft. Wonder if that
mad idea from 90 years ago ever
caught on?Last stand
The spokesperson for a certain
Italian maker of Cold War-era
attack rotorcraft describes the“Good morning, Argentina. Does anybody want to buy a
trade deal?”