In the two and a half years that Concorde has been in service with British Airways and Air France, the nine aircraft in service have carried 250 000 passengers, travelled 16 million miles and accumulated 15 310 flying hours. These numbers, though still small by airliner standards, are sufficient for effective comparison of service experience with predictions made and objectives set during the design process. This provides the central theme of our paper.

The Concorde project, always controversial, has been assessed many many times on technical, economic and environmental grounds. In fact it has inspired a literature of its own, comprising papers of all kinds–favourable and unfavourable, learned and hysterical. It has been the subject of predictions by the hundreds, ranging from the optimistic to the absolutely dire. This paper, written with the benefit of hindsight, is thereby distinguished from the bulk of this literature.

The continuation of mass travel over long distances, is inconceivable if the world really runs short of energy. Thus, looking at the year 2000 we have two alternatives:

either: fuel will be strictly rationed and reserved for essential purposes, which certainly would not include long-distance mass-travel,

or: fuel will continue to be freely available to the airlines at some price.

In the first scenario, there is no future for civil aviation as we know it and the aerospace industries must turn to new fields of endeavour.

In the second scenario, we have to answer the question: ‘what fuel at what price?'. This has to be answered because, if the price were to rise sufficiently, then the result would be similar to that of the first scenario as the present travelling public could no longer afford to buy airline tickets.

1. The training of airmen for trades in the ground electronics engineering trade group of the Royal Air Force, and in the trade which maintains flight simulators and other synthetic aviation trainers, is carried out at No 1 Radio School which since the early 1950s has been based at RAF Locking near Weston-super-Mare, in the County of Avon. This paper explains the RAF's requirement for a trade dedicated to Synthetic Trainer maintenance and how the training of that trade was planned and implemented.

2. In the early days of flight simulators the equipment used—of the Link trainer variety—was relatively simple using electrical and electro-pneumatic techniques. Maintenance was undertaken by electricians who received specialist training on the type to which they were assigned. With the development of sophisticated aircraft electronic instrumentation, radar, communications and weapons systems after the Second World War, flight simulators increased in complexity and servicing tradesmen were drawn from a variety of trades which themselves gave experience in electronics which provided essential background to undertaking simulator maintenance. The seven trades which donated tradesmen are shown in Fig. 1 which illustrates the range of basic skills used.

This paper considers the conversion training of qualified engineers employed in flight simulation from the background of experience in British Airways. The title is taken to mean the conversion of engineers qualified to appropriate standards, with experience in their chosen area which is demonstrated to be generally some form of electronics, to full skill level in flight simulation.

The rate of change in flight simulation is very fast. Training should keep up with these changes, but it is often hard-pressed to do so for reasons explained subsequently.

I would like first of all to explain the philosophy of our operation with an eye to the future for we are in a transitional stage at present. Our primary effort is a maintenance task where the 17 flight simulators will be divided into three groups. These groups will contain six analogue simulators and eight digital simulators currently in house, with three further simulators on order or about to be (Fig. 1). Not shown in Fig. 1 is a support group providing specialist service as required.

The knowledge about the position of the detached shock and the aerodynamic forces acting upon a booster front during upper stage (sustainer) jet impingement on a separated booster is needed in connection with the problem of stage separation in the atmosphere for a multistage launch vehicle. The jet flow is squeezed in by the free-stream and characterised by a non-uniform transverse variation of flow properties. The flow field analysis of a trailing blunt body in such a non-uniform flow has been limited to experimental studies only. Most of the prior analytical treatments were restricted to the study of the effect of free-stream non-uniformities such as source flow and wake-like free-stream velocities on blunt bodies. A somewhat related problem of supersonic, underexpanded jet impingement upon an infinite flat plate in the absence of external stream has been studied by Belov et al and Gummer and Hunt.