User:Slmvbs/Miles Venture

Miles Venture ... The Miles Technical Training School was established at Davis Farm near Woodley Aerodrome in 1943, with the particular backing of Blossom Miles. In August 1943, Mr. F. G. Miles asked the Miles Technical School to design and build an aircraft which could be used as a "test-bed " for an automatic pilot and for other electrical equipment. A high-wing twin-engined monoplane was specified, with a tricycle undercarriage and low landing speed, and the aircraft was required to carry two pilots with additional cabin space for engineers to work at a test bench. At the time, the only students with any drawing training were female students, and twelve of them submitted general designs. The best of these designs were used as a basis for further design work. A competition to find a name for the aircraft resulted in it being called Venture.

The students constructed the fuselage of the TS (Technical School) Venture The main spar, forty feet long, was set up and constructed from ply and spruce the project was destroyed in 1949 following the closure of the Miles Aircraft company In your May 19th issue, in describing the rearrangement of the former Miles Aircraft factory, you stated that the Miles Technical School has been taken over by the local education authority and that aerodynamics are no longer included in the syllabus. While it is true that no new intake of aeronautical students has yet been undertaken, there are still a number of students who started their course in the pre-L.E.A. era. To these students aerodynamics and aeronautical subjects are still taught, and in the December examination of the Royal Aeronautical Society, beside many other successes, two of our students took first places and another was awarded the Baden Powell Memorial Prize. L. J. CHANTLER, A.F.R.Ae.S., Senior Assistant Reading Technical College, Woodley, Berks. (late Miles Technical School)