Cleveland Races & Show

Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland repaired highways running west to Cleveland's municipal airport. Street cleaners dusted the downtown avenues. Sprinkling carts watered them. Citizens hung out flags. Janitors painted directional arrows on roofs. Enthusiasts formed a long parade of floats, bands, pedestrians. Police became super-courteous. Mayor John D. Marshall* rode in one of four blimps which the Goodyear-Zeppelin Co. sent over from Akron. Thus opened the Cleveland air races and show.

The U. S. aviation industry provided entertainment and instruction. It filled Cleveland's public auditorium, annex and Mall with more than $3,000,000 of exhibits -- planes, gliders, motors, accessories. Aircraft Development Corp.'s all-metal dirigible swam over from Detroit, the Navy's cloth-covered Los Angeles from Lakehurst. The cloth-covered Graf Zep pelin arrived from around the world (see p. 42).

The industry sent 1,200 planes to the municipal airport to race, stunt, skeedaddle. It sent air derbies skipping precariously from Santa Monica, Miami, Philadelphia, Portland (Ore.), Oakland, Toronto. At the industry's behest, Army, Navy, Marine Corps and (for the first time in the U. S.) Canadian military flyers demonstrated their maneuvers. Men and women, separately, raced. The women complained because they were not permitted in the general contests. The race management squelched them for the good of the industry, because deaths of a half-dozen men seem to shock the public less than the death of one woman.

Practically every important individual of the industry attended--flyers, presidents, salesmen. There was ample beer and liquor to drink, supplied from Pitts burgh, Buffalo, Detroit and Cleveland's Italian colony, but insufficient hotel rooms to drink it in discreetly.

Cynosure of the acrobatics/- was lanky Colonel Lindbergh. He and his wife flew together to the Cleveland airport. There he "joined" the Navy's "high hat" squad ron No. 1 of the aircraft carrier Saratoga, expert flyers. He took off each day at the head of a V-formation with Naval Lieutenants F. 0. Kivette and Frank O'Beirne dogging his tail. They snapped together over the field, rolled together, looped together, scooted towards earth together, never losing their formation. Then alone the antic colonel would take the sky, twirling about, flying upside down. Once a passenger transport neared them. Vexed they chased her, almost causing her to upset. Sentimental spectators sought to reprove for "needless risk."

Beautiful was the precision flying of nine planes from the U. S. A. C. Saratoga squadron. Twelve-yard ropes tied the planes together when they went aloft. After complicated air-actions very few of the ropes were torn, so closely had the pilots kept their positions.

Among scores of hazardous stunts, that of Bert Mackey, Colonial Airways' operation manager, was considered most terrific. He made seven outside loops in succession, a world record. The maneuver is to slip from a great height headlong down, then under, up, over, down. The forces acting on the plane and pilot are centrifugal. He is apt to be slung out of his plane, the plane apt to be burst apart.

So dumbfounding that it caused the laughter of relief was Juan de la Cierva's Autogiro, which he drove himself, repeating the gooselike antics of his Bryn Athyn, Pa., demonstration the week before (TIME, Sept. 2). He landed in a 20-ft. chalked circle, a simple feat for his machine.

The Army's best flyer and the Guggenheim Fund's safety experimenter, James Harold Doolittle, flew the wings off a plane in which he was practicing inverted dives. He jumped safely with a parachute, and at once put a duplicate plane through the same stunts.

Human Cost of attracting public attention to the Cleveland show, by derbies, races, stunts, was high. Killed: Marvel Crosson, of San Diego (at Wellton, Ariz., racing from Santa Monica); Thomas G. ("Jack") Reid, of Downey, Cal. (making a solo endurance record); Edward J. ("Red") Devereaux, of Woodside, L. I., Mrs. Devereaux, and Edward J. Reiss of New York (at Boston, racing from Philadelphia). Injured: Lady Mary (Sophie Elliott-Lynn) Heath, near-sighted (practicing a side-slip landing at Cleveland); Edwin Kirk, Great Lakes Aircraft mechanic, Lady Heath's passenger; William Patterson MacCracken, retiring Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Aeronautics (rushing from the races to greet the Graf Zeppelin at Lakehurst); Norma Stevens of Columbus, Ohio (parachute jumping); N. K. Lankford, Navy flyer (crashed at Lorain, Ohio).

Cleveland Air Industry. A queer phenomenon is that Cleveland, vast industrial community, has only one airplane factory-Great Lakes Aircraft Corp. In existence less than a year, it occupies the Glenn L. Martin Co. bomber plant, which that concern abandoned for new facilities at Baltimore. Great Lakes Aircraft president is Benjamin Frederick Castle, 45, onetime Army flyer who went into banking. His chief designer is Holden Chester Richardson, 50, onetime Navy aircraft engineer. They are producing airworthy sport, training, amphibian and cabin planes in small numbers.

Transportation, however, the city does not lack. It has many routes and uses them. Universal Air Lines carries passengers between Cleveland and Chicago, runs a taxi and hopping service at the Cleveland airport, has an aviation school there. Continental Air Lines, Universal subsidiary, operates a mail and passenger line between Cleveland and Louisville, by way of Akron, Columbus, Springfield, Dayton and Cincinnati. Colonial Western Air Lines, Universal affiliate through Aviation Corp., flies mail and occasionally passengers by way of Buffalo to Albany, where connections are made with the Canadian Colonial Airways New York-Montreal line. Thompson Aeronautical Corp. carries passengers by amphibians to Detroit, and mail beyond to Ann Arbor, Bay City, Kalamazoo, Chicago. At Cleveland it also has a taxi service. Stout Air Services also operate a Cleveland-Detroit passenger line. Clifford Ball has a mail line to Pittsburgh and a passenger line through to Washington. The through air mail from New York to Cleveland to Chicago is in the hands of National Air Transport.

Several airplane sales agencies conduct schools, taxi services or hops: U. S. Air Lines, Dungan Airways, Cleveland Institute of Aviation, Skyways, Stewart Aircraft Corp., Floyd J. Logan Aviation Co., Curtiss Flying Service (now being set up).

Transportation Chief. One air official who did not attend the Cleveland doings was Graham Bethune Grosvenor, 45, president of the Aviation Corp., which runs the chief air lines to Cleveland-Universal, Continental, Colonial. With all Cleveland-bound passenger planes loaded to capacity and performing safely, efficiently, the absence from the scene of the chief of the largest U. S. transportation system, emphasized the increasing complexity of aviation. The Races and Show probably did more for air travel than for plane sales, but crowds, air stunts and races, new models, accessories, celebrations, are mere details to the man at the switchboard of a $35,000,000 corporation with 291 airplanes operating over 9,128 miles, from Boston to El Paso and from Chicago to Brownsville. The Aviation Corp. is only six months old.

A typical problem which kept Mr. Grosvenor with his feet hooked under his swivel chair on the airy 48th floor of the Chanin Building in Manhattan was this: How to co-ordinate the schedules of Colonial, Universal, Embry-Riddle, Interstate and Southern airplanes so that each will feed the other traffic at their connecting divisions. The Aviation Corp.'s goal is to reduce air fares to approximate railroad fares. President Grosvenor says that will come, sooner than people think.

Transportation aloft is a life-story with President Grosvenor. As he rides up to his office in the elevator, he recalls that he began as an office boy for Otis Elevator Co. When he reaches the 48th floor, he can reflect that the elevator of his career has never stopped.

After learning electrical engineering through correspondence courses and rising via the sales force to be vice president of Otis Elevator, he took off into aviation with Sherman Mills Fairchild, a young Harvard man whose interest in aerial cameras had led him to manufacture airplanes. When the Aviation Corp. was formed to integrate companies in all phases of flying, the Fairchild industries went into it, carrying Mr. Grosvenor higher.

Now dawn the days when the air transportation companies loom as the railroads loomed 50 years ago. The Hills and Harrimans of the air do not fly their own planes any more than Hill and Harriman drove their own locomotives. But when they want to 'go somewhere they ride in planes, as a matter of course. Graham Grosvenor says that one of the best places to do concentrated thinking is close to a steadily roaring airplane motor, drawing you smoothly through space at 100 m. p. h.

*Nominal head of the city government. Operating head is City Manager William Rowland Hopkins (TIME, Sept. 2).

/-The Greek means literally "high goings on."