AVIATION: The Bumbling Boffins

Britain's aviation industry last week was taking one of its heaviest shellackings since the Battle of Britain. The walloping came from a wartime R.A.F. squadron leader named William A. Waterton, who later became a Paris-London speed-record holder (1947) and chief test pilot of Gloster Aircraft for seven postwar years. In the past two years, as aviation correspondent for London's Daily Express, Waterton has seldom concealed his conviction that British planemakers have allowed their aircraft to lag farther behind U.S. and Russian planes.

In a new book The Quick and the Dead, a...

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