Viewing page 217 of 274

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

68 COT Division, 1st Session--Final Report

Fleets of Philip; the Cabots came out from our west coast of England, the Netherlands navigators sailed the world and these people which had all the traditions of wide free navigation, in which the well marked trail did not and could not exist. That, Sir, I suggest has set us a long tradition, and a problem in Europe which differs greatly from the average world problem in aviation, and differs from the average United States problem, although not from the more difficult part of the United States problem. It has given us, in air communications, a repetition of the situation which earned for the Low Countries the name "Cockpit of Europe".

The Low countries are still criss crossed by routes, short elements of long or short routes, in which the crossings are extremely numerous and in which an attempt to lay down an airway system would produce something worse than the lowest diagram which I have asked your permission to put on the display board behind the Press Table.* At the same time, it has produced the kind of thinking that make us, in the United Kingdom, consider U.K. to be essentially a GEE country, as opposed to an airways country, and that leads us to believe that the majority of the European countries--including France, which gave us Jacques Cartier and which had its own navigators over the globe--to believe that these countries also, are necessarily countries which require area coverage of practically complete uniformity, and not airways countries with aviation trails.

We have made certain assumptions as to possible and different outcomes of the discussion this morning. We have prepared for ourselves three plans which ould only have been completed in the light of the discussions which have been going on right up to yesterday, and which we have consequently been unable to offer yet for circulation as COT documents. I would seek you approval to deal later with these submissions in the form of normal COT documents, but would ask leave to discuss them now in their present form.

Plan One (on your left as you face the board) is based on the assumption, an assumtion which we have convinced ourselves several times over, and ever more strongly, is an assumption which we could not accept, that universal standardization on the CW omnirange is carried to the extent of covering England  and southern Scotland up to Glasgow, Edinburgh, and a little beyond that, with such aids to short-range navigation as are given by CW omni.

We have tried first to equip our principal aerodromes with these omnis, in the close vicinity of the aerodromes. That has led us to begin our plan with the setting down of twenty-two VHF omni-stations. We found that we could not get any approximation to covering our existing route plan with these twenty-two and we, therefore, have been compelled to supplement the twenty-two stations by a further fifteen, situated off airfields in order to give route cover. We have had to add one station on Jersey, for

*See Plate inserted between pages 68 and 69.

reasons which will be obvious. We have made some allowance, but we have not fully allowed for the hill screening imposed on the diagrams of these thirty-eight stations. We have made the lowest possible estimate of the evil effect of that screening, and we have shown it in the deformations of the ideal circles coverage.

Having put down these thirty-eight stations, we leave shaded areas over quite a substantial portion of the area of England, which recieve no effective cover for aircraft flying either at 1,000 feet (305 m) or at 500 feet (152 m) above land 1,000 feet (305 m) or over. I would repeat, as a very important part of this argument, that we have been compelled to introduce CW omnis into the plan, outside the frequent assumption that these omnis may be situated at, or near, airfields. Even when we attempt to site near an airfield, we find a difficult case such as Croydon, with hills--the Downs at Caterham within a few milds of the airfield--destroying our coverage on that site, limiting our choice of this airfield site, driving us to put that particular omni on the top of Caterham Ridge. Remembering the grim name of the valley under the ridge (we have called it, not at all in jest, Caterham Death Valley), we call attention to the fact that the omni-beacon, with radio tracks converging on a point like that, is a notable complication in our plans, since it tends to bring our air pattern into such a form that the majority of aircraft are flying towards the one spot in the whole area that they are most anxious to avoid. We have examined the economics of this Plan One, and I shall deal with them in comparison with the economics of the other two plans.

Plan Two goes beyond Plan One, based on incompletely established facts concerning the VW omni, to the assumed availability of a scarcely yet invisaged "ideal" R/θ implement. We have assumed that the R/θ system, for which no one has the beginnings of a blueprint, is an R/θ installation with no site errors and is capable of providing accuracy of position to plus or minus, a quarter of a mile at 70 miles (113 km) from the beacon, and has the ability to operate with an airborne computer, allow its indications to be converted into track information without significant loss of accuracy. If we are to get full advantage from that non-existent ideal system, we must put our hypothetical beacons on the most favourable sites, which are necessarily on high ground. Doing that, we find that we give cover [under the conditions, to which I have already referred, of flying height 1,000 ft. (305 m) above sea level or 500 ft. (152 m) above ground 1,000 ft. (305 m) high or over] with thirteen stations on the mainland and one on Jersey, fourteen in all up to the Glasgow-Edinburgh region; we give good cover and yet leave clear approaches. If we had id, it would be a very nice system. We shall look at the cost after looking over Plan Three.

Plan Three is a natural, simple and economical development from the existing GEE cover which is -- and this cannot be over-emphasized--which is (so far as I am aware) at this very moment radiating pulses over Western