Fliers, Flights

When her bathroom scales read exactly 103 pounds, Elizabeth B. Patterson, Smith College student at Northampton, Mass., decided the cheapest way to get home to Santa Barbara, Calif., was to ship herself by air mail. Officials paid tribute to her wit, ingenuity, nerve, but turned down her offer of $300 and reminded her the charge per passenger for such a trip is $1,000.

Before incredulous experts, Capt. Geoffrey De Havilland took his Moth up over London, stalled his engine at a height of 200 feet, and deliberately crashed to the ground of Staglane Airdrome. The little plane crashed, crumbled; the experts gasped. But from the mess stepped Capt. De Havilland, smiling and nodding his head as if to say: "So you see, gentlemen, these Handley-Page automatic slots of which I have been telling you really do make an airplane fool-proof." The slots, attached to the wing tips, automatically open in case of accident, not unlike a parachute, and let an unhappy pilot down easy.

Said a letter to the Boeing Air Transport Co. which is building a huge plane for service between Oakland, Calif., and Chicago: "I am a sophomore at Vanderbilt University and I am very much interested in commercial aviation. I would like very much to get a job on one of your planes as a messenger boy or page."

Charles A. Levine has learned to fly. The man who plunged the Columbia into a 17,000 foot nosedive at the most critical time in her transatlantic trip, then flew alone and unaided from Paris to London, demonstrated his ability last week at Curtiss Field in quest of a pilot's license. He landed at a mark with and without power, did figure eights and other evolutions. Dean Percy T. Walden, in charge of freshmen at Yale, appealed to the Yale faculty last week to forbid the use of airplanes to first-year students. The Yale Aeronautical Society protested, fearful that the prohibition might extend to all students, as at Princeton. Started on a Junkers monoplane flight from Berlin westward to New York last week, Captain Hermann Koehl, Baron von Huenefeld and Mechanic Arthur Spindler reached Dublin, Ireland, whence they were to attempt a longer lurch.