Looking forward again : Notes on the needs, probabilities and possibilities in aeronautics

It is, and always will be, an honour to give the Handley Page Memorial Lecture, but for me the occasion has a special pietas because Sir Frederick Handley Page was a friend of mine for many years and I admired his extraordinary intelligence, pertinacity and independence of character. I had the honour to immediately follow him in two offices of high importance—as President of the RAeS and as Chairman of the Governors of this College, and as this is the last major lecture I intend to give, I am particularly happy that it is in his memory, just as the first major lecture I ever gave was in memory of that other great pioneer, Wilbur Wright. In October of last year I was asked, almost simultaneously, to provide a final and summary paper for the Second Century papers in the Aeronautical Journal and to give the 1969 Handley Page Memorial Lecture. I did not feel equal to the two tasks, but after it had been suggested that they should be rolled into one—that the Memorial Lecture should be the last Second Century paper —I finally agreed, on this basis, to write a paper. In 1940 I had the honour of giving the 28th Wilbur Wright Memorial Lecture. It was called "Looking Forward", and it was about the future of British civil aviation. In his paper introducing the Royal Aeronautical Society's Second Century Papers, Mr. Alien' was kind enough to include it among the prophetic writings he examined. "Looking Forward" was produced under difficult conditions. Had I not been afflicted in the spring of 1940 with German measles, I do not think it could possibly have been written. I could not, moreover, consider in my predictions the influence of the gas turbine, with the development of which I was already closely associated, because the work of Whittle and his friends was necessarily shrouded in secrecy. I do not mention these facts to excuse the paper, but to explain first how time could be found to create such a mass of verbiage in the midst of war, and second, to explain what might at first seem a curious omission. I delivered the paper almost exactly 29 years ago, but the occasion is clear in my mind. The Society's President, Mr. Griffith Brewer, was in the United States with his old friend Orville Wright, and in the chair was that wonderful character, Brab, at that time still Lt. Col. J. T. C. MooreBrabazon. London was under attack, but the lecture was held in the great hall of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The possibility of a less attractive venue was, however, in the Chairman's mind, for he announced the determination of the Society to continue the Wilbur Wright lectures in the war "even if it became necessary to hold them, like the early Christians, underground in catacombs".