MR GEOFFREY KNIGHT, Chairman of the Weybridge and Filton Divisions of the British Aircraft Corporation, presented an extremely illuminating paper on ‘The Civil Aircraft Industry’ at the Spring Convention on Economic Factors in Aviation held by the Royal Aeronautical Society on 13/14th May, 1970. In his opening remarks Mr Knight said that the subject was one which could well form the basis for a symposium rather than a single lecture, but in spite of this proviso his paper contained a detailed analysis of transport aircraft projects since the war; it examined the airline market, the commercial criteria for launching new projects, political aspects, the effect on the airframe industry of aero engine policies and the future. In the latter portion of the paper Mr Knight is justly critical of the Plowden Report and its failure to distinguish between the commercial and military markets. Although he thought that the Report made a number of extremely useful and valuable recommendations, he believed that as far as the commercial aircraft industry was concerned it had done untold damage from which we had only just begun to recover in the last couple of years. In contrast to Plowden's dismal prognosis on the short term civil outlook, the last few years had been the most favourable that his own company had known in the commercial aircraft market. The trouble stemmed from the fact that the industry was cyclical one, and any group of people lacking an intimate knowledge of it and examining it at one end of the cycle would be likely to reach quite different conclusions than if it were examined at another part of the cycle.