Much Talk—Little Flying
In a strictly commercial sense the Tudor I aircraft does not pay. In a broader sense, as a source of useful information to constructors and operators, it might conceivably pay in the long run whatever its voyage accounts might say. Anyway the Courtney Committee, which was set up to investigate the inordinately long time taken in develop- ing and constructing this type, has recommended that it should be put into service as soon as possible. It would be impossible to follow all the convolutions of this dreadful example of what is called public enterprise without doing injustice to somebody. In fact the real moral—and a very important one it is—is that nobody was to blame. It is possible to find fault with the unco-operative and irritable way in which the B.O.A.C. and the constructors, Messrs. A. V. Roe and Company, behaved towards each other It is possible, though not original, to deplore the shifts whereby the Government Departments concerned, the Ministries of Supply and Civil Aviation, avoided taking responsibility. But the chief trouble was that there was nobody to direct all these bodies to do their job and decide once and for all whether it was desirable to go ahead with the Tudor I or abandon it. The problems to be solved were not easy. The difficulty in draw- ing the line between those technical modifications which are essential and those which are merely desirable goes down to the root conflict between engineer and business manager. And it will not be ended by . a stroke of the pen, particularly now that the crude spur of the threat of bankruptcy has been removed without anything which could be called enlightened State direction taking its place.
Previous page
