July 28, 1984

John W. Hinckley Jr., who shot and wounded President Reagan in March 1981, made an unannounced court appearance today and said ''I am ready now'' to seek a ''release hearing.'' Speaking in a strong, clear voice, Mr. Hinckley stood before Federal District Judge Barrington D. Parker and said, ''I have talked to some doctors and they want to back me up.'' He did not identify the doctors. Courtroom observers understood Mr. Hinckley to be seeking complete freedom from St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he has been held since June 1982, when a jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the shootings of Mr. Reagan and three other men. Under a special act of Congress applicable only in the District of Columbia, Mr. Hinckley is entitled to be released from the mental hospital if he can prove that he is no longer dangerous to himself or others by reason of mental illness.

The Common Market was pushed into a new financial crisis today, barely a month after its leaders said they had resolved its protracted internal quarrels over money. In an unusual display of one of its few powers, the European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, voted 212 to 70 to block payment of a $600 million budget rebate that leaders of the market had promised Britain this year. The pledge was part of the Fontainebleau summit accord last month on reforming the finances of the trading bloc, whose formal name is the European Economic Community. That agreement was supposed to end the bitter disputes over the community's runaway farm spending and Britain's complaint that it pays an unfair share of it. The quarrel had virtually paralyzed the Common Market for the preceding four years.

The hour has come. The Games of the XXIII Olympiad will begin Saturday with extravagant opening ceremonies worthy of their Hollywood setting. The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will be packed to its 93,000 capacity with tickets costing $200, $100 or $50 each. The organizers will spend $7 million for the opening and closing ceremonies alone.

The chief engineer for the manufacturer of the Navy's F-18 aircraft said today that the company's tests a decade ago underestimated the stress that has caused cracks in the jet's tail. ''Had we properly assessed it, we would have designed for it and not had the problems we have,'' Don Snyder, director of F-18 engineering at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation, said in a telephone interview. His statement came amid preliminary jockeying between the Navy and McDonnell over which should pay to repair the F-18's, billed as the service's most versatile warplane. The Navy announced this week that it had restricted the way F-18's could be flown until a design problem that sometimes causes violent air currents to buffet the plane's tail was corrected. In January, according to a Navy spokesman, cracks were discovered in F-18's at the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent River, Md. An order to restrict flying to unstressful conditions was issued July 14.

George Gallup developed polling into an important force in the world. An appreciation, page 9. George H. Gallup, an inquisitive Iowan who pioneered in the techniques of public opinion polling and did much to make it a key tool of politics, government, business and scholarship, has died at his summer home in Switzerland. He was 82 years old. Speaking from Princeton, N.J., where Dr. Gallup had his headquarters, his assistant, Sarah H. Van Allen, said he died Thursday at Tschingel, a village near the Lake of Thun in central Switzerland.