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Components for the ground‐launched weapons produced at the British Aerospace Aerodynamics Group factory at Stevenage must be produced to precision engineering standards from high grade materials, which are often aluminium alloys with a high silica content which wears tools rapidly. To meet this problem, the machine shop and quality control departments at Stevenage have developed very close co‐operation in the introduction and integrated use of new CNC machine tools and electronic measuring equipment capable of assuring quality with improved work flow. Every workpiece produced by CNC machining is gauged after each machining operation or multi‐gauged as it comes off the machine. This constant monitoring detects sudden errors due, for example, to chipped tools and allows the correction of trends before they go outside set tolerances.

The film approach to history in this paper I want to consider the film as source material for history in the sense that palimpsest and parchment, hieroglyph and rune, clay tablet and manorial roll are source materials—fragments, sometimes fragments of fragments, often defaced by time, and applied to purposes of historical reconstruction rarely contemplated by the original authors. For the most part I shall not be particularly concerned with the various philosophies of history—whether it is the job of the historian to lay material dispassionately before the student so that he can make up his own mind about what happened in the past, or to digest source material in order to arrive at the truth—that is, what the historian may hope is the whole incontrovertible real truth, or to digest source material, as Macaulay and Carlyle digested it, in order to justify something in contemporary life or thought. All that need be said here for the moment is that films can be used, as other historical source material can be used, for various and different historical purposes.

It is announced by the Chairman of British European Airways, Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, that the Minister of Civil Aviation has approved the appointment of Mr Peter Masefield, as Chief Executive of British European Airways Corporation, of Dorland House, Lower Regent Street, S.W.I.

With Sir Peter Masefield in the chair, the Royal Aeronautical Society's discussion of Third Level and Regional Airlines was opened with a Keynote Address by N. D. Norman, in which he sought to define these two types of operations by referring to the traffic progression which transforms a “commuter” airline into one which finds its aircraft too small and not capable of flying longer sectors. There appears to be three main causes for increase of traffic: the reduction of surface travel; the rising cost of surface transport; and the emergence of new industries (eg oil in the North Sea).

This book, which has a foreword by Sir Peter Masefield, covers a very vexed subject in considerable depth.

IT does not require a very large crystal ball to envisage the growth of aviation during the next fifteen years. Sea travel has become too slow; air travel has become reliable and more independent of weather conditions; world trade has forced travel into the remotest areas; industrial countries have become more affluent, and the urge for private world travel has accompanied affluence. It is not surprising, therefore, to hear the Chairman of the British Airport Authority, Peter Masefield, predict a fifteenfold growth in air traffic in the United Kingdom during the next twenty years and to find the F.A.A. confidently anticipating a doubling of passenger traffic in five years and a nine‐fold increase in small jets in the same period.

Leading British aerospace figure Charles Masefield was recently instituted as president of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He succeeds Dr Geoffrey Pope, recently retired deputy chief scientific adviser at the Ministry of Defence.

ONE OF THE major consequences of the continued, steady, growth of air transport throughout the world is the growing requirement for airports development. Not only are existing airports having to be improved and expanded but a number of new international airports are having to be planned and constructed to serve both the larger traffic centres as well as the spread of air transport to new business and tourist areas.