Flights & Flyers

Rescue Machinery. Hampered for weeks by fog over open water in the Bering Strait, the rescue machinery assembled to deliver Carl Ben Eielson and Earl Borland, lost since Nov. 9 (TIME, Dec. 9), began to rustle last week with activity in Nome, Alaska.

Eielson is vice president and general manager of Alaskan Airways. Inc., subsidiary of the powerful and influential Aviation Corp. He was on the second flight of rescue to an ice-beleaguered fur trading ship when he dropped from sight somewhere near Cape North, Siberia. He and Borland had food for a month. Last week that time elapsed. At Teller, Alaska, has been established a secondary base for the impatient rescuers.

To extend their searching range, the five planes of the Alaskan Airways assembled there, planned a fuel base half way between Teller and Cape North. Some idea of the hardships of Arctic cold and lack of adequate food may be had from the story of the McAlpine air party in search of copper marooned for nearly two months above the Arctic Circle and living chiefly on the charity of Eskimos (TIME, Nov. 18).

Balloon races for the James Gordon Bennett trophy have been awarded to Cleveland for 1930. (Chicago gets next year's air races.)

Hop Incentive. Col. W. E. Easterwood Jr., of Dallas, Tex., renewed his 1927 offer of $25,000 for the first flight from Hongkong, China to Dallas last week. He hoped that James Drummond Dole, Hawaiian pineapple sponsor of the Oakland, Cal. to Honolulu race in 1927, would add another $25,000 for the race. It involves stops at Tokyo, Honolulu and on the Pacific Coast.

Two Pilots. Martin Jensen, second prize Dole Pacific flyer, and Bartlett Stephens, acting superintendent of the San Francisco Municipal Airport, started a short hop at San Francisco. Down the runway roared their plane. She crow hopped along, got up in the air, fell off on a wing. Jensen, scared, hauled her back to level. He remarked gently on his friend's handling of the ship. Stephens, aggrieved, had been thinking the same thing. Each had thought the other was piloting.

Rogue & Gull. With a tale of having flown for the British Royal Flying Corps in Italy and of being a Carter of Cartersville, Ky., one Robert A. Carter, 32, intriguing fictionist, became managing editor of John B. Kelly's air-fiction magazine Wings. He "wrote" good stories which Mr. Kelly gladly published. But one was a word-for-word steal from another "air" magazine, Air Trails, whose publisher complained. Last week roguish Mr. Carter was in jail for confessed fraud.

Augmented Airlines.

Transcontinental Air Transport announced last week an augmented train plane schedule linking Manhattan with San Francisco. Transcontinental passengers now transfer at Los Angeles (Glendale Terminal Airport) and for $10 extra reach San Francisco about three hours later. Present (reduced) net charges for transcontinental air rail travel (New York to Los Angeles, over the Maddux Line which recently merged with T. A. T.) are: T. A. T., $267.43; Western Air Express, $211.20; Universal Air Lines System, $223.51.

Passenger. Fred Warren Green, Michigan's Governor, proudly held Ticket No. 100,000 for a flight from Detroit to Cleveland on the regular run of the Stout Air Lines. Last year he used ticket No. 50,000 on the same line.

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