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Progress in Military Airlift

For the first time in its 38 year-life, the AGARD Flight Mechanics Panel devoted a full
Symposium to Airlift.
Of course, in other symposia, organized by the FMP or even by other AGARD Panels,
some parts could more or less apply to transport aircraft. (For example, appendix 1 lists
the lectures that could be targeted to airlift in the last decade of FMP Symposia).
The rarity of this event is a kind of a confirmation of the secondary role in which
transport aircraft were considered, compared with fighter aircraft,— something like
cavalry and freight—wagons in the ancient times.
A more important manifestation of this disfavour was that Airlift used to be ignored
in budget priority in nearly all countries (except perhaps in the USSR!), which resulted
in the fact, several times mentioned during this symposium, that no new airlifter has
been put into operation during the last twenty years, and even, speaking of a "tactical"
airlifter, during the last thirty years.
However many conflicts in the last forty years revealed the growing importance of
airlift, the last and most striking example having occured just after this symposium.
Recently, taking into account these various experiences and the progressive phasing
out of the existing aircraft, several countries started thinking about what a new tactical
airlifter would look like, which made this symposium come in the right time to benefit
from these studies. With the addition of the wave of new technologies, many of them
having been already developed for civil airplanes, ample matter was available for its
programme.
Let us also recall that the Symposium had to be responsive, when relevant, to the
Technology Study Proposal on "Flight Deck Configuration and Systems Requirements for
the NATO Future Large Aircraf" (TSP 1/87). However, the TPC decided that, for a
symposium, it would be more appropriate to enlarge the scope, to cover the full range of
advenced technologies applicable to a new generation of military transport aircraft.