The future of V/S.T.O.L. Available to Purchase

TIME is money. This is the simple premise on which airlines have built up a network of routes girdling the world, yet in spite of the tremendous increase in cruising speed of present‐day airliners it takes as long to travel from the centre of London to the centre of Paris as it did forty years ago. The present trend is for airports to be pushed farther and farther from the cities they serve, the roads steadily become more and more congested and although the technology necessary to develop high speed surface travel is available, the vast investment needed to translate the ideas from the drawing board into hardware has reduced most of the projects to ‘pie in the sky’ status. To link city centre to airport, or to adjoining city centres in the case of short haul routes, must be the most pressing need of airlines in their plans for future expansion. The public is, for the most part, extraordinarily tolerant of the vagaries of air transport. With the supersonic transport era almost on us, even the most seasoned air traveller will find the contrast between crossing the Atlantic in a little over three hours and then taking a further two hours to be processed to the city centre a little difficult to accept. Britain has led the world in producing practical V/S.T.O.L. hardware in the military field, with the result that the R.A.F. will be the first air force to have V/S.T.O.L. aircraft in operational service. Both the major airframe consfructors are looking at civil V/S.T.O.L. variants using lift jets, vectored thrust engines, or with lift fans in the wing. Westland Aircraft Ltd. is exploring the potential of tilt‐rotor and tilt‐wing concepts as they think that this field holds more promise than the compound helicopter. On the engine side Rolls‐Royce have undoubtedly more experience than any oilier engine manufacturer on lift engines and are developing an advanced integral lift fan engine for the civil V.T.O.L. field.