FUTURE OF FLYING — ^WIMPERIS 497 



For a take-off speed of 100 miles per hour (i. e., stalling speed of 

 80) the wing loading would be about 40 pounds per square foot, 

 suitable for civil types having a top speed of, say, 300 miles per 

 hour (since the take-off and landing speeds would then be about 100). 

 But once in the air a much larger load could of course be carried. 



In the case of military types having top speeds of 550 miles per 

 hour or thereabouts, the landing speed could hardly be less than 

 150, giving a wing loading of 100 pounds per square foot. It looks 

 therefore as though in the coming years the wing loadings for civil 

 types will go little beyond what is now planned in many drawing 

 offices, but in the case of military types the present-day figures may 

 certainly be doubled unless some new wing arrangement can be 

 discovered which will greatly reduce the loading figure when a 

 landing is about to take place. Rotating wings are the perfect solu- 

 tion for the landing problem, but how to combine them with means 

 for the attainment of high horizontal speed is a problem which 

 the future has yet to solve. The one recent development — or re- 

 vival — which seems to promise a great advance in safe landing is 

 the tricycle undercarriage, the use of which seems to be almost all 

 pure gain. In a lecture before the Royal Aeronautical Society last 

 year H. F. Vessey expressed the rather conservative view that al- 

 though with landplanes of the normal type it is difficult to see any 

 considerable increase in wing loading at landing above about 30 

 pounds per square foot if present restrictions on landing distances 

 over a barrier are to be maintained, nevertheless he admits that by 

 the use of the tricycle undercarriage the loading might go as high 

 as 40. 



It is odd that chance should decide — or at least appear to de- 

 cide — the future of so many forms of human activity. Almost at 

 its birth, broadcasting in Great Britain fell into good hands, and 

 the cinema into bad, but aeronautical research, very fortunately, into 

 good. I can imagine a critic remarking that it was not quite all 

 chance, and that organized aeronautical research owed much to the 

 wise foresight of the late Lord Haldane, who caused there to be created 

 an Aeronautical Research Committee with funds for research workers 

 and apparatus for them to use. 



Fortunate it was indeed that research in aeronautics was so wisely 

 led and adequately supported. It was a new science, and one of the 

 few happy results of the Great War was that it drew into this serv- 

 ice some of the most brilliant young scientific men of the day, especially 

 from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. And this interest 

 held, for even now the leaders are largely drawn from that band of 



