Chapter 7
I The First 100 Years 1788-1888
II Railways
III Motorised Vehicles
IV Aviation
i Local Inventions, Research, Design and Manufacture
ii The Development of Air Transport: The Trail Blazers
iii The Services
iv The Royal Flying Doctor Service
v Ground Aids and Safety Innovations
vi From Aviation to Modern Shipping
V Modern Shipping
VI Innovative Small Craft
VII Conclusion
VIII Acknowledgements
IX Contributors
References
Index
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Local Inventions, Research, Design and Manufacture (continued)
In 1979 the RAAF issued a requirement for a new Basic Trainer aircraft and the three major aircraft companies, Hawker de Havilland, Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation and Government Aircraft Factories, formed in 1981, a jointly owned company, the Australian Aircraft Consortium, to manage the programme and to design and develop this aircraft called the A-10 (Fig. 30). The specification was very demanding and, for the first time in Australia, the aircraft was to be designed to full military specifications. Due to various problems, among which the most important were the interface problems between the Service Project Management and the Australian Aircraft Consortium and the lack of experience of local designers in designing to military specifications, the project milestones fell back and the costs increased. In December, 1985, when the A-10 prototype had just emerged from final assembly, the government cancelled the local programme and decided to order a Swiss aircraft, the Pilatus PC09. One of the results of this decision was to cripple the local aeronautical design capabilities for the following decade.[35]
Organisations in Australian Science at Work - Australian Aircraft Consortium; Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation (C.A.C.); Government Aircraft Factories; Hawker de Havilland
People in Bright Sparcs - Schaetzel, Stanley S.
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Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering |  |
© 1988 Print Edition page 511, Online Edition 2000
Published by Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, using the Web Academic Resource Publisher
http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/504.html