VAST AREA INUNDATED

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 118, 23 May 1929, Page 13

VAST AREA INUNDATED

CREATION OF AIR POCKETS

MAIL 'PLANE IN PERIL

United Press Association—By Electric Tele Eraph—Copsricht. "Times" Cables.

(Received 23rd May, noon.)

BASRA, 22nd May

I'ho Indian mail airliner dropped like a stone four thousand feet with engines stopped to within four hundred feet of Lake Hamtnar owing to its being caught in an air pocket, the result of atmospheric conditions, due to the floods in Irak. , This was among the experiences of a Bagdad passenger from Basra. He adds that the engines were cut out, the petrol temporarily not reaching them, owing to the velocity of the fail. Luckily they refunctioned in the nick of time, when the pilot was anticipating that a forced descent on the water was inevitable.

The whole countryside is a most remarkable spectacle, fully one-third of the distance, 350 miles, is inundated, and the railway is breached in two places, in one of which a mile of track has disappeared. Cultivators are laced with enormous losses. The floods stretch to the horizon, interspersed with tiny islets of grain stacks. The Euphrates is falling, but 110 benefit is possible down stream until the volumes of flood water have drained off from the numerous depressions.