The Evaluation of Flutter Characteristics in Design: A Lecture Given to the Belfast Branch of The Royal Aeronautical Society on Tuesday, February 23, 1954

IT is commonly held that today we are living in the age of the specialist. Within the aircraft industry, no one is more vulnerable to having this label of specialist thrust upon him than the flutter and vibration engineer, but I submit that far from having the narrow outlook which is taken to be the specialist's chief property, the flutter man has to be part stressman and part aerodynamicist; he must also have a working knowledge of the application of electronics to modern vibration test techniques and computing machinery, to say nothing of being part mathematician and, not least, part engineer, for we must not forget that after all, strange as it may seem at times to some of us, in the calm of our design offices, we are engaged in the engineering business.