The world's aircraft industries have devoted substantial effort in the past decade towards the realisation of aircraft which can take-off and land vertically. Such aircraft have many potential applications for both military and civil use. Two dominating operational factors have emerged: noise and downwash. In the author's opinion, jet lift and fan lift aircraft with their high disc loadings will prove too noisy for city-centre use and produce too violent a down-wash flow to operate from unprepared sites. These difficulties, added to the inherently higher power requirements of high disc loading, have swung attention more and more towards large lifting rotors, varying from large dual-purpose propellers to more conventional helicopter rotors.

Students of history or economics would not be in any way surprised to read this quotation, declaring it to be nothing more than a visionary's warning and the often characteristic habit of history repeating itself, since the words seem more fitting to the problems facing the country today than in the grim early 1930s when the whole world was suffering from a serious trade recession. Although increased efficiency, on the lines suggested by Sir Henry, would no doubt have alleviated this country's problems, it is most doubtful whether under such adverse world conditions it would have been sufficient by itself.

Design management is concerned with the exercise of mental, verbal and graphical skills which are so directed and controlled to meet a social need or needs. Any manager's job can briefly be stated as being composed of two complementary parts:

• (i) Deciding what has to be done, and

• (ii) assuring that the appropriate actions are taken to achieve the decisions taken.

The functions of a manager are concerned with; forecasting, planning, organising, controlling, evaluating and directing. In practice these tend to spiral around as time proceeds, and may be depicted as in Fig. 1. In the centre of this diagram is the important factor of motivation which all good managers have and are able to inject into their staff. In engineering, design is the necessary prelude to the manipulation of matter. But before design ideas can be turned into hardware they have to be transferred through the design process.

Long before the legendary Queen Dido cleverly maximised the area of future Carthage by choosing the optimum perimeter shape, man probably consciously or subconsciously tried to optimise his designs as well as his actions.

In a more modern time, the post Renaissance period witnessed development of the principles of optimisation on a rigorous mathematical basis, as exemplified in works of Newton, Leibniz, Euler and many others. Eventually, those optimisation ideas were even transplanted by Leibniz and his school to the field of general philosophy, providing an attractive target for the merciless satire of Voltaire in Candide.

The early papers given in this symposium, dealing with Civil and Military Market Research, form the basis for identification of possible new projects. The last paper to be given today, dealing with Value Analysis, deals with the subject of meeting design, manufacturing and quality requirements for a given cost.

The object of this paper is to deal with one important aspect of the process that takes place between completion of recommendations from Market Research and the setting up and control process in Value Analysis. To give some idea of the activities that take place between phases involving Market Research and Value Analysis, the flow chart of Fig. 1 has been prepared showing the interrelation between technical, manufacturing and economic appraisals.

KLM Noordzee Helikopters exists primarily to serve North Sea oil rigs. The service is available on a 24-hr basis without restrictions. The main base of the company is situated at Schiphol Airport.

In the Netherlands helicopters are not permitted to fly VMC at night, while VMC at day is often not possible because the cloudbase over land, except for a few low flying routes, has to be over 1000 ft.

So our company was from the start of operations committed to instrument flying with helicopters as the weather in the Netherlands is usually very bad in the wintertime, which lasts for 6-8 months.