United Kingdom - Ireland

Mar. 22 Cool It Yourself Air suits go on trial at Farnborough: A selection of space age personal conditioning systems is on trial to test their suitability for Royal Air Force aircrew, in a series of experiments just beginning at the R.A.F. Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough, Hants. The Institute is running the trials jointly with the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. The trials in which full time pilots from the RAF's Central Flying School will be the guinea pigs are designed to simulate, in one of the Institute's sophisticated climatic chambers fully equipped with its own artificial sun, the precise climatic conditions which would fave the aircrew of say, a supersonic Phantom fighter bomber operating from a hot airfield in the Mediterranean. The main purpose is to compare methods seat of a high speed aeroplane, operating in a hot climate, subjected to a great deal of radiant heat; In these trials a direct comparison will be made between three types of personal conditioning systems. Two of them look like a set of grandma's combinations, threaded with an elaborate network of arteries carrying either air or water. The airman puts them on under his normal flying suit. Both the water cooled suit this similar to those worn by the American spaceman and the one using convective air cooling system are designed to plug into a source of supply with him. In the third type also air cooled the arteries carrying the air are actually built into the flying suit itself and they merely draw in the surrounding air, keeping the flyer's whole body, in effect awathed though it may be in the complex equipment necessary for flying a supersonic fighter, as cool as if he were sitting in the nude. Photo shows Four men undergoing a test in flying conditions with simulated sun radiation from the overhead lights. They are (l to r) George Bryant (in water suit); F/Lt. David Coldicott (suck in air suit); Peter Redman (Ideal Air Suit) and Lt. Tony Prescott (with no under suit)

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