The Beagle‐Miles M.2I8

THE concept of an ‘all‐plastics’ airframe has been possible of achievement since the early 1940s but, apart from some special applications, such as radar and radio transparencies, bearings, fuel tanks, etc., the introduction of reinforced bonded materials has been extremely slow. Curiously, and despite the intense pressures of technological advances, the aircraft industry is conservative and many innovations which can be seen in retrospect to have been inevitable, have been held back for years until they have been forced on the designers by circumstances. Cases in point are the time taken to abandon the biplane to accept wing flaps and to adopt variable‐pitch propellers. Even the jet engine was, for a long time, squeezed into airframes of obviously unsuitable shape. Nevertheless, it seems surprising that it has taken some twenty years to bring the use of plastics for major airframe components to the stage of practical proof.