|
The Hamburg Branch held it annual Christmas dinner on the 4th December at the prestigeous Anglo-German Club situated in a 140 year-old villa on the banks of the Outer Alster Lake in Hamburg. 35 members and friends attended and enjoyed excellent food, good company and conversation in this very traditional Hamburg club ambiance.Special guest and after-dinner speaker was Dr Georges Bridel, current President of CEAS and who comes from Switzerland. He entertained us with a fascinating talk on "Pioneers in Swiss Aerospace", a subject which most of us knew little about. In fact it is surprising how many of the founding fathers of aerodynamic theory were Swiss or studied in Switzerland. Scientists like Bernoulli, Euler, Piccard, and Ackeret etc all came from Switzerland and many of them studied at the ETH in Zurich. After WW2 there were several very advanced Swiss military aircraft projects all of which failed due mainly to lack of support from the customer. Bill Lear and his Lear Jet started in Switzerland using the wing of the P16 fighter-bomber aircraft designed by the Swiss engineer Dr Hans-Luzius Studer who was also Bill Lear's Technical Director. Here there is a link to Hamburg because after Bill Lear returned to America, Dr Studer came to Hamburg and became Chief Engineer of the HFB 320, the business jet with swept-forward wings and was also responsible for several VTOL projects.Dr Bridel finished by talking about the aims of the CEAS and emphasised how essential it was that in Europe we should all work together, if not we will lose out to the competition from the new emerging nations on the aerospace playing field.In conclusion, the Hamburg Chairman, Dr Hans-Henrich Altfeld thanked Dr Bridel for his fascinating talk and said that we have a big debt to pay to the Swiss for their contributions to aerospace sciences. |
