Flights of the Week

With admiration but not astonishment the world watched the following flights last week:

New York-Istanbul Big-framed Russell N. Boardman, onetime cowboy, motorcyclist and wingwalker, and small John L. Polando, onetime garage mechanic, pulled the Bellanca monoplane Cape Cod up from Floyd Bennett Field, New York, and struck the well-travelled Great Circle Course to Europe. For two nights and a day the plane was unsighted from land or sea, even when it dropped a copy of the New York Times upon Le Bourget Field. It landed at Istanbul's Yeshilkeuy Airdrome, 5,011 mi. and 49 hr. from the takeoff. For their superb piloting and navigation, for being the first eastward transatlantic flyers since Lindbergh (1927) to reach their destination nonstop, President Mustafa Kemal Pasha bemedaled Pilots Boardman & Polando.

New York-New York? Seventeen minutes after the Cape Cod took off, another Bellanca monoplane chased after her from the same field, the Miss Veedol, manned by Socialite Hugh Herndon Jr. and oldtime Barnstormer Clyde Pangborn. They thought they could beat the eight-day record of Post & Gatty around the world. Their plane was much slower than the bulletlike Winnie Mae but it had a longer cruising range, and Herndon & Pangborn could take turns at the controls whereas Pilot Post was obliged to fly without relief. They gained time by cutting short their stops, but unscheduled landings put the Miss Veedol about a day behind the Winnie Mae when she quit the race at Khabarovsk, Siberia.

Seattle-Tokyo. The white Lockheed monoplane Fort Worth, driven back by weather last month in an attempt to fly from Seattle to Tokyo by refuelling from a "nurse" plane (TIME, July 20), got away to a second start. Pilots Reginald L. Robbins & Harry S. Jones took fuel over Fairbanks, lost their nurse plane in a fog half way to Nome, turned back to land at Fairbanks.

Northern Passage. With "no official starting point and no finish," Colonel Charles Augustus Lindbergh & wife set out upon a pleasure flight to the Orient. They said goodbyes at Washington, New York, and at the estate of Father-in-Law Morrow at North Haven, Me., where they left Baby Charles Augustus ("Eaglet") Jr. Then they turned their low-wing Lockheed-Sirius, with its gasoline-laden pontoons, north to Canada. The hop to Ottawa was simple, gave Co-Pilot Anne Morrow Lindbergh opportunity to practice radio communication with the Pan-American Airways base near New York. West of Ottawa the pair had their first look at the wilderness over which they must fly on most of their course. Followed by flying newshawks, they spent a night at Moose Factory, remote outpost at the lower tip of Hudson's Bay; flew on to Churchill, Canada's booming northern grain port; thence set out for Baker Lake and Aklavik, a route from which many a seasoned airman of the North had tried to dissuade them. From Aklavik their course lies west through Point Barrow, Nome, the tips of Siberia, the Kuril Islands and Tokyo.

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