In 1997 the leaders of Britain, Germany & France threw down the gauntlet to Europe’s aerospace companies, telling them to work together in order to succeed. In his Wilbur & Orville Wright Lecture, the former test pilot, President of BAe Commercial Aircraft, Commercial Director of Airbus and the then Head of the Defence Export Service Department at the MOD, explores the functions at play that led to the announcement and the unique issues and challenges that faced the airframe and platform integration industry in the late 1990s. At the heart of his argument is that the success of cross-European projects and the growing difficulties of smaller aerospace companies, should lead to European companies following the lead of their US competitors by rationalising and restructuring the industry and creating European centres of excellence; only with these large companies could Europe’s companies halt duplication and triplication and then continue to be equal partners in transatlantic collaborative programmes capable of competing with new rivals from Asia.

Sir Charles warms-up his audience with his personal assessment of the sixteen most influential airframe platforms of the first 94 years of powered flight.

The 86th Wilbur & Orval Wright Lecture took place on 11 December 1997, the podcast was edited by Mike Stanberry FRAeS and it was digitised thanks to a grant from the Royal Aeronautical Society Foundation.