Progress

An Imperial Airways (British) liner bound out of Amsterdam for London was late, or would be if her pilot took time to climb aloft to his usual travel level. The big plane sped down the low Dutch coast. Some 80 miles past the Belgian border . . . Plud! ... a wild duck, hypnotized with fright, flew straight into a propeller of the roaring frame crossing its path. The liner had to descend. A message flashed to London brought a new propeller in a few hours by air. The passengers re-embarked and were treated to the first night flight ever made by an Imperial Airways ship, landing at their destination none the worse for the accident. Soon Imperial Airways will have regular night schedules, planned these many months.

Next afternoon the English Channel was strewn with fog and a wrack of rain. Approaching Romney Marsh on the shore of Kent, a big new Farman Goliath passenger plane, belonging to the French Air Union, sent chills through its 13 passengers by groping low for its bearings, faltering as with engine trouble. Steering over the marsh toward the village of Hurst, the pilot struggled with his controls. A barn roof loomed underneath. The world tipped crazily, spinning around. Crash! A haystack flew at the shrieking passengers, then another, then the cabin crushed in upon them, everything upside down in pain, screams, a horrifying silence. Some of the passengers regained consciousness before they were dragged out; some awoke in Folkestone and Sandgate hospitals. Robert Blaney, just-graduated-from-Harvard son of Artist Dwight Blaney of Boston never awoke; neither did another passenger, an Italian. The French pilot died next day. The British Air Ministry started investigations into "the most serious passenger airplane tragedy England has ever experienced."* Yet there was no thought of abating air travel in Europe. Frightful though it was, the Hurst crash was a rare occurrence. Despatches juxtaposed with news of the victims, told that U. S. travelers were responsible for a record week of flying between London and Paris --1,539 passengers in 183 machines, with 35 tons of freight and baggage. Despatches from Germany announced extension of the European air mail network to reach Teheran, capital of Persia; a through route from Europe to Mesopotamia; a projected passenger service from Berlin clear across Asia to Peking. In Europe, air travel is so firmly established that no one said, "Dreamer!" at the following prediction of a Frenchman who visited London last week: "Everything -- fuel, passengers and crew--will be carried inside enormous wings in machines of the future. Passengers will be able to move freely inside and I see no reason why they should not enjoy the amenities of seagoing passengers of today in the way of promenades, dancing, games and music. To fly from Paris or London to New York will be commonplace." Now this speaker was Louis Bleriot, who, in July, 1909, performed the then unheard-of feat of flying across the English Channel. The Bleriot monoplane of 1909 was something of a portent and Louis Bleriot has been building aircraft ever since. Never till last week had he repeated his flight of 1909, either as pilot or passenger, "because until two years ago I considered that flying from Paris to London was dangerous." But now, as soon as he could raise two million francs, he would build another monoplane, with wings two meters thick and with four motors, and hope to see it flown across the Atlantic by his young son. The contrast between M. Bleriot's prediction and a prediction made almost simultaneously by U. S. Postmaster-General Harry S. New was virtually the contrast between European and U. S. air progress. "It is my sincere belief," said Mr. New earnestly, "that within a comparatively short time a person desiring to do so may leave New York by a ship carrying the air mail after the close of business hours Saturday and be in San Francisco or Los Angeles for the opening of business Monday morning." Mr. New was urging, as he had often urged before, that companies contracting to carry air mail equip themselves also to carry passengers, that being the only way they can operate their routes profitably. The striking thing was that of the 13 U. S. mail-carrying companies now active, only three offer passenger service--those operating between Philadelphia and Washington, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, Jacksonville, Tampa and Miami. Most of the contracting companies, according to Mr. New, are losing money. Last week, Contractor Charles Dickinson of the St. Paul-Chicago route begged to have his contract canceled, obliging the Post Office Department to call for new bids just two months after inauguration of this link in the system (TIME, June 21). Said Mr. New of Contractor Dickinson: "Of course he lost money. . . . Receipts from mail alone would no more meet his expenses than they would those of the St. Paul or the Northwestern Railroad over the same route. . . . "

Many air mail carrying companies, however, have announced plans for passenger service and ordered cabin planes. Evidence of progress visible in last week's news alone: Cuba and Mexico. A report that Mexico would cooperate to connect Mexico City with the Chicago-Dallas U. S. air mail line; an agreement by the U. S. to carry Mexican mail by air through the U. S. A report that passenger and mail services would promptly be established between Tampa and Miami, Fla., and Havana, the lines going northward to Manhattan, perhaps Boston.

Secretary MacCracken. Newly-appointed Aviation Secretary William P. MacCracken Jr. of the Department of Commerce (TIME, Aug. 23), called to him in Washington leading civil air officials, heard their wishes, despatched five Army flyers to survey the country's five major air mail routes, spotting places where emergency landing fields, 30 miles apart, may be laid off; noting the illumination of present landing fields and its adequacy for civilian use. Then he opened bids for 116,500 revolving 24-inch lights, to be erected on poles at ten-mile intervals along air routes. To the Sperry Gyroscope Co.* he gave an order for 90 lights at $467 each. Figures. Last week the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce summarized its survey of the past year of U. S. flying. The figures were claimed to show that the U. S. "leads the world." They showed five and a half million miles flown, carrying 200,000 passengers, and air express in excess of 112 tons, by 290 commercial operators. But these figures were grossly misleading in two respects: 1) the passengers were not carried on permanently scheduled lines from point to point, but had gone, mostly trial or excursion flights from amusement fields; 2) the geographical size of the U. S. necessarily swelled the mileage total as compared with European figures, in which two round trips between Paris and Brussels, with four separate loads of freight and fares, would not equal a one-way flight between Chicago and New York.

Also last week, the Detroit Aviation Society reported 16 companies now engaged at Detroit in manufacturing aircraft or their accessories, with plant investments of five millions and orders on their books for five and a quarter millions. Said Chief Engineer William B. Mayo of the Ford Motor Co.: "Aviation has really become an industry."

Fokker. At a dinner given by the Wright Aeronautical Co. in honor of Poleflyers Byrd and Bennett, up stood Anthony H. G. Fokker, Dutch designer of most of Germany's wartime planes, of the Pole-reaching Josephine Ford and many another efficient machine, to announce that he so believed in the U. S. as the chief flying nation of the future that he had determined to become a citizen, permanently coming over from the ranks of European engineers.

Ford Tour

Into a white circle at the Ford airport, Detroit, flew a straggling squadron of airplanes--19 of the 23 that had set out a fortnight ago on the 2,555-mile Ford Reliability Tour around a rough quadrangle cornered by St. Paul, Lincoln, Neb., Cincinnati and Cleveland (TIME, Aug. 9). Each entry had been rated according to its fuel consumption, manageability, carrying power, and other qualities, leaving it up to the pilots to gain further points by good speed and navigation in getting from point to point. Not a great deal of figuring was needed to award first prize to Pilot Walter Beach and his Wright-motored Travel Air No. 2. With perfect equipment, and higher speed than most, he had been able to leave the stopping places last and arrive at destinations irst; also, he was aided by an able navigator, Brice Goldsborough of the Pioneer Instrument Co. Notable was the failure of the trimotored Ford all-metal entries to finish. Flying one of these, Pilot R. W. Schroeder had the misfortune to chip a propeller, resulting in terrific vibration in that motor. Over Nova, Ohio, the motor tore loose from its mounting, threw a piece of debris into another propeller, smashing it and leaving the plane with only one propeller to land by. It was an unforseeable accident, due not so much to mechanical deficiency as to ill luck. Aeronauts mourned that the most widely advertised of commercial ships should thus come to grief and shake public confidence in the very event most calculated to promote flying.

*Dispatches containing this phrase neglected to recall the crash at Croydon on Christmas Eve, 1925, when an Imperial Airways pilot and his seven passengers died instantly. *Inventor Elmer A. Sperry of the gyroscope compass and commercial gyroscope, began engineering 45 years ago as a lighting man in Chicago; has developed a searchlight for war use, of which the 1,200,000,000-candlepower beam will pick out objects 30,000 ft. high in the night heavens (TIME, March 30, 1925).