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Chadderton, England — the home of British Aerospace PLC (BAe), the British company which plays an important role in the Airbus project as designer and builder of the wings for A300, A310, A320 and A340 aircraft. The wings are designed at BAe, Filton, prior to machining at Chadderton, following which assembly is undertaken at BAe in Chester. The company has a one‐fifth share in the Airbus business representing £1 billion turnover and with orders and deliveries for the aircraft approaching 900, the importance of Airbus to the plant is continuing to increase.

A researcher at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science (Evanston, Illinois) has developed an X‐ray device that is believed to be the first practical means of detecting corrosion hidden beneath the surface of an aircraft's body. When the “virtual core drill” is positioned against the side of an aircraft, a computer screen shows an image of the layers of metal under the surface of the skin. If one or more of those layers are corroded, the amount of corrosion will be recorded on the screen, to an accuracy of 1/1.000 of an inch. The virtual core drill or, more technically, a Compton backscatter depth profilometer, was invented by Larry Lawson, research scientist at the McCormick School's Centre for Quality Engineering and Failure Prevention. The device sends con‐trolled X‐ray beams through the plane's body and detects those X‐rays that are deflected back at an angle near 90° from each layer. Today, whenever corrosion is detected on aircraft, the section must be dismantled, the layers pulled apart, and a micrometer used to measure the thickness. If the corrosion represents more than 10 per cent. the part must be replaced. The virtual core drill can eliminate the downtime and the damage that occurs when aircraft have to be torn apart for inspection. The new device includes a 200lb scan head, which is attached to the plane using feet shaped like suction cups while supported by a flexible boom mounted on a vehicle resembling a fork‐lift truck. The vehicle moves the scan head up and down the aircraft. The drill is equipped with the most sensitive detector known, the sodium iodide scintillator. The drill provides the same kind of information, layer by layer, as would be provided by cutting a plug out of the aircraft with a core drill, except that the aircraft is undamaged. Radiation exposure also is minimal.

Accles & Pollock Ltd. of Oldbury, Worcestershire, a TI Steel Tube Division company, will be exhibiting a comprehensive range of precision steel tube and tubular products, including plain, annularly convoluted and thin wall tube, at Farnborough.

THE conference opened with the paper by Mr Woodward‐Nutt, which, together with the other papers, is summarized below. After the first session the conference luncheon was held, and the principal speakers were the Mayor of Southampton, Alderman R. E. Edmunds, who welcomed the conference to Southampton, and Sir Edward Boyle, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply, who referred to current concern about delays in fighter deliveries. He said that there had in the last year been setbacks, but the delays were due to difficulties of development rather than of production. The comparison which was often made of deliveries during the last war was not fair, because the aircraft in question had then been developed. The Spitfire took five years to develop, and this did not compare so unfavourably with the development of the Hunter, when the increase in complexity and the aerodynamic difficulties of the transonic region were considered. Flight trials were the only indication of many of these troubles, and modifications were necessary after the tests. It was for this reason that the Ministry had adopted the policy of ordering up to twenty development aircraft, with the intention that by the time the last one had been built it would be in a form suitable for the production version.

TO say that the Twenty‐fourth S.B.A.C. Show was an unqualified success is perhaps to gild the lily. True there were disappointments— the delay which kept the TSR‐2 on the ground until well after the Show being one—but on the whole the British industry was well pleased with Farnborough week and if future sales could be related to the number of visitors then the order books would be full for many years to come. The total attendance at the Show was well over 400,000—this figure including just under 300,000 members of the public who paid to enter on the last three days of the Show. Those who argued in favour of allowing a two‐year interval between the 1962 Show and this one seem to be fully vindicated, for these attendance figures are an all‐time record. This augurs well for the future for it would appear that potential customers from overseas are still anxious to attend the Farnborough Show, while the public attendance figures indicate that Britain is still air‐minded to a very healthy degree. It is difficult to pick out any one feature or even one aircraft as being really outstanding at Farnborough, but certainly the range of rear‐engined civil jets (HS. 125, BAC One‐Eleven, Trident and VCIQ) served as a re‐minder that British aeronautical engineering prowess is without parallel, while the number of rotorcraft to be seen in the flying display empha‐sized the growing importance of the helicopter in both civil and military operations. As far as the value of Farnborough is concerned, it is certainly a most useful shop window for British aerospace products, and if few new orders are actually received at Farnborough, a very large number are announced— as our ’Orders and Contracts' column on page 332 bears witness. It is not possible to cover every exhibit displayed at the Farnborough Show but the following report describes a wide cross‐section beginning with the exhibits of the major airframe and engine companies.

OF the 450 plus numerical control systems for machine tools currently being used in the United Kingdom, well over 100 systems are being operated by companies in or associated with the aircraft industry. In fact, the aircraft industry has probably done more than any other industry to pioneer, encourage and develop the use of numerically‐controlled machine tools. On the other hand, the application of numerical control within the aircraft industry itself is still in its infancy and it is therefore the purpose of this survey to outline the characteristics of the range of control systems now available. According to Report No. 119 entitled ‘Numerical Control: An Economic Survey’ by the Production Engineering Research Association of Great Britain, a survey revealed that many of the early applications of numerical control to machine tools were carried out without being economically justified. At that time, many of the advantages of numerical control were highlighted while some of the problems associated with their use were either not fully understood or ignored. However, the experience gained by a number of operators over a period of years has now put the use of this type of equipment into proper perspective. Since numerically‐controlled machine tools cost between li to 4 times as much as conventional machines it is necessary to justify this higher cost by direct or indirect savings. The direct savings, which can be measured and expressed in terms of time and money or both, may occur in (i) the pre‐production stage, by the simplification or elimination of jigs and tools, (ii) the production stage, by the elimination of marking‐out and reductions in setting, machining, handling and inspection times, and (iii) the assembly stage, by reductions in fitting or assembly times as a result of improved product quality. Indirect savings, which tend to be intangible, are: the reduction in lead times, the ease of design modification, the savings in scrap or rectification work, the reduction in jig and tool storage costs, and the reduction of operator fatigue. However, the picture has its greyer tones, and to brighten these a joint study convention was recently held by the British Electrical and Allied Manufacturers' Association and The Machine Tool Trades Association to foster such improvements as: the adoption of a common programming approach involving if possible a common numerical control language, the development of new machine tools specifically intended for use with numerical control systems and a greater degree of Government support for the introduction of numerically‐controlled machine tools used on Government production contracts. It is not the purpose of this article to describe the performance of machine tools equipped with numerical control systems but merely to present a survey of systems available. However, wherever possible examples have been quoted of the application of the numerical control system to particular machine tools—and a large number of these to machine tools being used in the aircraft industry. For a more detailed account of the application of numerically controlled machine tools, the reader is referred to the article beginning on p. 232, and to PERA Report No. 119. This PERA Report is a major contribution to literature on this subject and we are happy to acknowledge the use of a certain amount of the information contained in that Report in the following article.