PEOPLE IN THE SKY

[Music] every day 2 million people sleep as they fly as confident in flight as birds sweeping across the face of the earth who are the people who give today's passengers so much confidence in flying they include not only the crew but thousands of ground staff controllers engineers scientists and researchers constantly improving the partnership between man and machine that has revolutionized the way we travel [Music] this is the story of how in the space of a single lifetime they've turned the passenger who was a daring adventurer into a daily commuter [Music] [Applause] [Music] the reality of fly is now an everyday experience shared by ordinary people but even so less than 5% of all the people who live in the world have ever been in an aircraft the dream of low-cost flying for everyone is a dream that is just beginning already in the 10 years since this little girl was born the return fare from England to Australia has dropped by as much as a third from the time the first intercontinental air routes opened up passengers were financed by freight mainly by an airmail letter service today London Airport handles 11 billion pounds worth of cargo a year 3 billion pounds more than any of Britain's docks [Music] even Concorde flies a supersonic Parcel Service that can leave London in the morning and arrive in New York one hour earlier their time [Music] this child's fight will be just one of almost a thousand handled every 24 hours by London Heathrow the busiest International Airport in the world with an aircraft landing and taking off every 60 seconds turnaround time is vital every minute a plane is on the ground it's losing money so even the speed of refueling techniques has had to be rethought below the tarmac huge fuel storage tanks pump 800 gallons of kerosene into the wings each minute [Music] the growth in air transport has been explosive Heathrow opened in 1946 and handled 63,000 passengers that year now it handles that same number of passengers every day before lunch Katie Katie do you mean my name is Brent my daughter's Australia yes you are [Music] only ten years before this child was born most people travelling to Australia went by sea at one time there were as many as 40 sailings a month from England to New York but by 1962 the writing was on the wall for the shipping companies over half the passengers coming in and out of Britain were travelling by air today for each passenger on a ship there are 200 in a plane in a minute 20 years the speed and cheapness of air travel have made it the most popular way of moving around the world [Music] as this child leaves for Sydney on her own it's remarkable to reflect that the very first channeled Air Service left London for Paris only 60 years ago [Applause] the first service carried only one passenger as well as newspapers in Devonshire cream and seven brace of grouse by the thirties there were 12 passengers are daring privileged elite aircraft first took to the skies with all the fragility of fabric-covered insects and flying was admired from a distance as a glamorous adventure for the rich and carefree just half a century later a luxury has become commonplace [Music] [Music] all this child Mouser flying is the hair and now she couldn't be expected to know how it was when her parents were born but modern air travel began in the 40s with the development of the jet engine something new in jet aircraft is the vickers mike hunt a thirty two seater airliner seen here before its first public trial flight four gas turbines are used to drive ordinary propellers making the turboprop as it's called the first airliner of its kind in the world another proof that in the field of jet propulsion British engineers are second to none [Music] in the early 50s British designers made another huge leap into the future the comet the world's first pure jet airliner [Music] the comet realized the early dream of flight to travel higher further faster than ever before it was twice as fast as its competitors and not a great deal slower than today's Jumbo's in the race to increase speed we came a breathtakingly long way in a short space of time but less than 30 years later the comet stands derelict a museum piece why it was fast but it carried only 44 passengers when it was born that were already 25 million people buying air tickets every year today there are 700 million [Music] the aircraft taking off for Australia now has to be large enough to carry 500 passengers powerful enough to handle dramatically greater loads and especially to handle the more economically [Music] [Music] until the 50s there was only one class of air travel first in the late sixties British Airways pioneer lower fares with a special early bird service to Commonwealth countries like Australia but the concept of an intercontinental bus system bringing the cost of air travel within reach of everyone only became a practical reality in 1976 with the efforts and foresight of one man sir Freddie Laker he invented no-frills flying if the airlines the high cost airlines if they continue to operate seats for less than cost they will go out of business remember knife here is related to the cost there's is a so-called competitive response I now have the opportunity of doing what I've always wanted to do put my money where my mouth is I think as skytrains gonna be a tremendous success but no one really knows in fact flying now revolves around the basic equation of more people wanting to travel more often for less money each year airlines are having to find ways to put their product within the pockets of a mass market and in an age of inflation the only thing going down in price is an air ticket [Music] the first air ticket from London to Sydney cost over four years of an average Australians earnings in 1934 today it costs less than four weeks pay cost-conscious flying has become the key to the developments of the next decade above all else it demands a more efficient flying machine [Music] how are you design [Music] much more is required of today's planes than of their predecessors especially of their angels where fuel economy has become vital this 747 is fitted with Rome's royce rb211 engines they carry it 35,000 feet into the air where it cruises at a speed of just under 600 miles an hour 30 years ago a Viking could only make 200 miles an hour at 10,000 feet its limits were determined by its engine capability propellers driven by internal combustion engines literally have to screw themselves through huge quantities of air slowly and with a great deal of vibration the Comets pure jet engines were both fast and smooth they sucked in a massive air expanded it by heat in the combustion chamber and threw it out the back to get vastly improved propulsion but to burn that much air requires huge amounts of expensive kerosene and that makes pure jet engines an economic it was the need to economize on fuel without a great reduction in speed that was the driving force behind the development of the turbofan engine the air sucked into the engine is divided most of it bypasses the combustion chamber and only one sixth forms the jet that small proportion of hot air powers a huge fan that accelerates the much larger amount of cold air so it's the fast-moving cold air that provides most of the engine's thrust from an engineering point of view the turbofan is a major advance in aircraft design it uses 25% less fuel than the old pure jet engine and is very much faster and smoother than the prop this new generation of British engines is the result of years of painstaking research and massive financial investment they combine high-speed economy with quiet pollution-free jet travel although a few may be aware of it they brought cheaper and more comfortable travel on the world's airlines we take for granted the years of research that going to improve performance but aircraft are wrapped in layers of social and ecological problems an obvious one is noise engineers are now winning the battle to reduce it to acceptable levels a fast exhaust stream creates a high noise level which is why a 707 takeoff can be heard within 50 square miles of an airport by contrast a Tristar can only be heard within 7 square miles it's rolls-royce engines have a much slower exhaust stream today's engines even have soundproof linings and in the smaller twin-engine category the new european airbus is one of the quietest aircraft flying but while noise is a relatively new priority for scientists and engineers safety has always been important this current anglo-american project is researching ways to make aviation fuel even safer at the Royal aircraft establishment near London a rocket sled laden with a tank of kerosene is shot along a test track at a hundred and seventy miles an hour when the sled is stopped abruptly throwing the fuel forward it escapes in a fine mist of tiny droplets one spark is enough to ignite the lot [Music] already work has resulted in a special additive that binds the fuel droplets together in chemically linked chains the same test is repeated now the misting phenomenon that causes fire is prevented within the decade this special fuel additive will make flying even safer but the greatest problem facing modern flying is lack of fuel with Airlines anticipating a growth rate and known oil reserves shrinking to 30 years at current levels of consumption what are the alternatives well there's still a lot of coal and it has a major role to play in future energy needs not that they'll be Stoker's onboard your next flight to New York but with more coal being burnt elsewhere kerosene will be released for the aviation industry and there's also sugar sugar can produce alcohol it's already driving car engines so perhaps by growing plants like sugar we may find an easily renewable source of fuel there's even work on hydrogen that leme in people's eyes because hydrogen used today a space fuel could also power future aircraft engines over the past 10 years the price of aviation fuel has risen by 400% and yet the price of tickets has gone steadily down it's an achievement that I was a great deal to the ingenuity of designers their solution to the energy crisis has been to find ways to make modern aircraft actually save fuel [Music] new approaches to wing design get much more lifting power out of the airflow over a plane's wings birds and insects control that airflow with effortless artistry and aircraft designers strive to match them [Music] it's to the natural world that the designer constantly returns and from which he still has so much to learn it was the wingtip feathers of a bird of prey that gave the invaluable clue to this new British invention this research model has the shape of a normal aircraft wing its tip creates a turbulence as it rips through the air and that turbulence drags the plane back and wingtip sails and the flow of air becomes visibly smoother they lessen drag and with the reduced demand on its engines an aircraft can cut fuel consumption by 10% with today's big airliners drag is also caused by airflow over the wings reaching supersonic speed even though the plane doesn't a specially designed wing can minimize drag but building it demands the most advanced technology like that used in the construction of the new European Airbus its advanced wings are designed and made by British Aerospace compared to a conventional wing they increase lift by 15% and save about 10% more fuel and when fuel can be as much as a quarter of an airline's operating costs 10% means hundreds of thousands of pounds when the wings are completed they're loaded into a freight plane and flown across the channel wings flying wings between Britain Germany and France the partners in this outstanding story of European cooperation nowadays the expense involved in the design and construction of modern aircraft is so immense that it's greater than the available resources of individual countries the future lies in international cooperation on projects like the a300 airbus more and more we will fly in planes whose engines airframes and components are made in different countries and continents for the air traveler the importance of national boundaries has already decreased now it's the turn of the aerospace industry itself to follow the same principle it helped to establish today we commute between continents and between cities with Hawker Siddeley executive jets we even commute between business appointments because it's quicker easier and above all cheaper to fly for every transatlantic run by a jumbo there are hundreds of short hops by a fleet of small taxes of the air like the britten-norman Islanders the shortest is less than a minute from one mountaintop to another but without it people would be totally isolated we even fly a plane to catch a plane using 30 C to short sky commuters to travel into mainline airports most of us like miss child just accept that we're only hours even minutes away from each other as she arrives in Australia she's traveled halfway around the world over eleven thousand miles in under 24 hours [Music] aeroplanes are safe places self-contained worlds this one is a 30 million pound investment in international research and technology that's made it safer more efficient more economic than ever before and for the passenger it's really great achievement is that it makes possible a journey like this at a cost of less than four pence a mile [Music] [Applause] [Music] during the space of this film alone there have been over 42,000 people in the sky quite a compliment to the people who put them there in the first place and this 10 year old who takes for granted cheap global travel that had its beginnings only 60 years ago what of her future how will she be traveling in another 60 years [Music] [Music] [Music]