Adjustment and Achievement

Abstract

IT is not our usual practice on this page to review the activities of the year, but it does seem that at this time it is possible to take stock of the position of the industry. The pattern imposed by the changes in Government policy foreshadowed in the famous Defence White Paper of 1957 is now becoming clear, and we are no longer reduced to uncertain prophesy. The most gloomy forebodings do not seem to have been justified; and if employment figures in the industry are a fair guide, the decline in work, though not negligible, has not been particularly alarming. Some of the aircraft firms more closely associated with purely military, particularly fighter, aircraft in the past have turned in varying degrees to other work. It is fortunate that the developments in nuclear power have led to a large scale engineering demand for that degree of skill and precision, with careful control, which has in the past been associated with laboratory work, and which has hitherto entered the larger works only in the aircraft industry. As a result several firms are carrying out work for the nuclear power industry and therefore that part of their work ceases to be of direct concern to this journal. It may be that the fall in employment indicated in the official returns for work on aircraft represents a transfer to work of another kind within what are still basically aircraft firms, rather than a contraction of those firms with consequent redundancy. In this the industry is showing a flexibility true to its origins in that some of the firms whose names are now household words, because of their aircraft work, began in other fields such as general engineering, furniture making, boatbuilding, and so on. We may regret even a slight contraction in aircraft work on prestige grounds, but providing we can still produce fine aircraft for which the demand exists, and providing skilled teams in office and works are not seriously dispersed, the importance of such fluctuations should not be over‐emphasized.

Citation

(1959), "Adjustment and Achievement", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 1-1. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb033063