Technology and Culture

Conference Reports FIFTY YEARS OF AIR TRANSPORT HISTORY: AIAA MEETING, ANAHEIM, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 1969 R. CARGILL HALL AND JAMES J. SLOAN The Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), held at Anaheim, California, in October 1969, had “Air Transportation” as its general theme. The AIAA Tech­ nical Committee on History sponsored an all-day session of papers on aviation transport history, in two parts: “Before the Jets” and “The Later Decades.” The historical program sessions were cosponsored by the American Aviation Historical Society and the Society for the His­ tory of Technology. Robert Brooks (information officer, Norton Air Force Base, Cali­ fornia) led off the morning program with a teview of the development and successful trial flights of a twenty-six-passenger, “closed cabin,” twin-engine, biplane transport in 1919, largely designed and promoted by Alfred W. Lawson. The paper, “The Airliner and Its Inventor, Al­ fred W. Lawson,” was prepared primarily from contemporary news accounts and from Lawson’s own book of the same name, unabashedly ghost-written by Lawson himself under the pseudonym Cy Q. Faunce. Lawson’s plane flew, and well; but after attracting a great deal of pub­ licity, Lawson made the mistake of many engineers in not being satisfied with his machine. Further innovations kept the project in a state of con­ tinual change, eating up the financial backing engendered by his promo­ tion until disaster, through the crash of his second (though improved) prototype, overtook the company Lawson had founded. Lawson’s de­ sign was a practical step forward for air transport in America; his ec­ centricities were not. Brooks’s paper offered some useful insight on the Mr. Hall is historian of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Sloan is managing editor of the Journal of the American Aviation History Society. Mr. Hall is primarily responsible for the account of the first program session and the evening meeting of air historians, and Mr. Sloan for the description of the program session on “The Later Decades.” 401 402 R. Cargill Hall and James J. Sloan origin and development of American commercial air transport thinking and technology directly after World War I. “The Emergence of Air Transport 1925-1935” was described by Sidney J. Albright (Information Bureau manager, Western Air Lines). His paper covered the period when the commercial airlines were over­ coming the doldrums created by a surfeit of war-surplus Liberty en­ gines and Jennys. These years encompassed the rise and fall and rise again of commercial networks, boosted by Lindbergh’s famous flight and favorable federal legislation, busted by the Great Depression, and boomed again by the modern metal monococque passenger transport with adequate horsepower from greatly enlarged air-cooled radial engines. Harvey H. Lippincott (for many years an installations engineer with Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Corp., and founder and now museum di­ rector of the Connecticut Aeronautical Historical Association) spoke on the historic adaption of military-developed air-cooled piston engines and later jet engines to meet the needs of commercial air transport in the United States. His paper, “Adaption of Military Aircraft Engines to Commercial Air Transport,” included discussion of the competing needs of military and commercial service, the principal engines involved and engineering alterations made, and overall trends in engine development for the military and, more recently, for commercial transport ventures. Lippincott surveyed briefly the early developments of the radial engine; innovations in design of cylinders, heads, and induction systems; and the invention of new and improved bearings that greatly extended the life of the commercial engine over that of the military type. His paper pointed up the low hourly usage of engines in military service and their corresponding lack of demand upon the entire system. In the most extensive paper of the session Richard K. Smith (National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution) provided a valuable synoptic overview of “Fifty Years of Transatlantic Flight,” from the NC-4 to Lisbon in 1919 to the visit of the giant B-747 to the Paris air show in 1969. In the absence of Dr. Smith, R. Cargill Hall, chairman of the program session, read Smith’s paper (Preprint no. 69...