AERIAL DEFENCE

Auckland Star, Volume LIV, Issue 148, 23 June 1923, Page 7

AERIAL DEFENCE

BRITAIN'S HUGE MACHINES. ' SPEED OF 150 MILES. 'PLANES' ATTACK ON FLEET. (By Cable.—Press Association.—Copyright.; LONDON, June 22. The mystery surrounding the new equipment of the Royal Air Force has j been lifted sufficiently to show that the | new machines are sufli as, would have j staggered the imagination only a year • ago. They include machines which lly I with full "military equipment, men and; munitions, at a 'speed of 150 miles an' hour at a height of over 10,000 ft. They arc capable of twisting and turning with extraordinary facility. The experts are gratified at the results of the experiments. In the Naval Department the latest types of torpedo carriers are the j Blackburn-Dart and Hnndtey-Fage-Ham-ley. Both are single seaters with a speed of 100 miles. Several other types are ready which, it is considered, will place. England ahead of the other Towers in aircraft. In the presence of thousands of people linig the foreshore, six aeroplanes car- j ried out a trial attack on the Atlantic fleet at Weymouth on Wednesday night,; using aerial torpedoes. All the ships' lights had been extinguished. The aero-1 planes, though they flew low, had the j greatest difficulty in spotting tV; target. The Weymouih correspondent of the i "Daily Express" states that three out of | six dummy torpedoes hit the Queen Elizabeth, Valiant, and another warship during a night attack.— (A. and N.Z.) Tt is admitted that at present the British Air Force is outnumbered by France by three to one, but the British force i 3 small, with the smallness of concentrated efficiency. It strikes one as being one of those tabloid-brand affairs of which two grains or so by weight go to make a whole bucketful. Walking across the well-rolled field, neatly bordered with camouflaged hanj gars, workshops, hospital and barracks, I was shown a small—ridiculously small j single-seater aeroplane, says an English correspondent. I should say that for absolute nakedness of wings and feather it appeared to the layman as incapable lof flight as the world-famed parrot at Tom tgly's, Sydney, in its last ageing days. ' J But I saw it fly. The pilot shouted "contact"; the glistening steel propellor disappeared in a cloud of spurting flame and sniokn, and in a second I was watch- I ing the black helmet of the pilot mount- , ing in the wake of a rocket that, without ; preliminary run, literally leapt into the air and held inflexible to its almost , vertiele course. I 'That machine," said my guide, '"could ' lick, single-handed, any three machines owned by France or any country in the , world to-day." # j A comparison of hawks and sparrows | was framing in my mind when I was told to watch the "featherless one care- j fully. "Vcs, certainly, it was travelling on a level keel in a series of jerks—first , like a streak and then practically stopping. What of it? My companion smiled. •'•Supposing," he said, "you are diving down on an enemy who ambles along at a constant speed, he would make a sitting shot, eh?" I nodded. "But supposing at the moment of your attack he were able to stop almost dead, I you would find yourself just where he wanted you —going down in front of his nose! It's you who would be the sitting shot." That was the secret of this little machine. It could climb as fast, or faster than anything in the air, it could twist and corkscrew and dive, as we saw it but its star turn was to suddenly change speed from 130 to 37 miles an hour" without losing a foot of height. After all, there was some reason for the Air Ministry forbidding aircraft constructors to exhibit fheir latest models at international shows. There is not the slighest reason to suppose that the war-time spirit and j esprit de corps of the Royal Air Force has in any way diminished. One Saturday morning I was told a party of pilots, each mounted in Sopwith i scouts, were amusing themselves chasing j swallows in at one door of a hangar and j out at the other. After lunch the enter- | tainment was resumed. The first man to swoop into the hangar found that the great steel doors at the further end j had been closed. The door partly yielded to the terrific impact, which hurled the aeroplane and pilot, a shapeless mass of wreckage, across the concrete floor The pilot who followed—one may imagine, without a flicker of an eyelid—sized-up the situation on the instant—it was all the time he had. While spectators waited breathless for the crash, he calmly i turned one wing, swallow-like, to the I ground and darted through the narrow 1 opening made by his ill-fated companion.