Brian
Sorry, I don't have a Kermode handy (I was a Piercy man myself - or to be more accurate I was told to acquire Piercy's Aerodynamics by my college in 1950)
Piercy (and it has to be likely that his 536 page tome was typical of late 1940s UK usage) calls the angle between the free stream airflow and the chord line of an aerofoil its incidence and refers to it as alpha. So that seems to support the notion you quote.
Given this and the fact that Dave's book was first published in 1967 it does not surprise me that he uses the word incidence for what we call AoA today.
I had the pleasure of flying with Dave at Bedford when he came to look at our Concorde takeoff director trials in a Vulcan back in Feb 67, but the nature of that flight did not call for a discussion about alpha. It was sufficient merely to refer to high alpha and low alpha. Clearly we both had the same appreciation of what alpha stood for (if not the name of the angle).
Since age matters in this context Dave was 13 years older than me.
Last edited by John Farley; 1st January 2011 at 12:43.