Caribou

One sunbright afternoon last week Imperial Airways' 24-ton, clean-bodied Caribou cleaved a spuming white wake through Southampton harbor, rose and winged northwest on the first flight of her long-planned transatlantic mail service. Three hours later she put in briefly at the Foynes, Eire marine base, rose again trailing a weighted line for a refueling maneuver never before attempted in commercial transport service. Above her silvery-sleek spine flew an ugly, dark-snouted bomber converted into an air-going tanker. At some 500 feet the tanker's ejector flung out a grapnel. It hooked around the Caribou's line, skidded along to the tip, locked fast with a corresponding gripper. With the electric potentials of both planes equalized to prevent static sparks, the tanker's crew joined a pipe line to the grapnel, fed it back to the Caribou to be coupled with her gas tank valves. While the two planes soared out over Foynes at 120 m.p.h., the tanker flushed the pipe line with nitrogen (to remove air, which, in combination with gasoline, might explode), pumped after it 800 gals. of fuel. Seventeen minutes later she uphauled the line, waved cheerio and cocked around for home. The Caribou knuckled down to her 3,500-mile flight against heavy winds.

This answer to the challenge of Pan American's 41-ton Clippers (which last week completed in 24 hours their thirtieth crossing of the Atlantic) had cost Imperial many a costly survey flight, costlier technical trials & errors. The chief problem had been to provide for profitable payloads. Since Imperial's Empire flying boats could not lift half the Clippers' payload from the water, they had resorted to getting as much of a load as possible in the air, then gassing up for the long ocean flight.

Thirty-six hours from starting point (twelve hours slower than the Clippers) the Caribou, after lighting to deliver part of her 1,000-lb. mail load in Botwood, Newfoundland and Montreal, glided into Port Washington, L. I. If her speed and payload had lagged behind the Clippers', Britain could console herself that no nation could dispute her No. 2 rank in the North Atlantic. Air France, which also has a treaty right to land transatlantic mail and passengers in the U. S., is still in the survey stage. When Imperial shakes down, the Caribou and her sistership Cabot will carry mail, no passengers, each week between the U. S. and Britain. Pan American once carried 27 passengers, 791 lb. of mail to Europe.

Record

From San Francisco to Reno in one hour, 54 minutes (41 minutes better than the light plane record for that distance) flew Pilot Sally Rand.

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