FLYING SOUTH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 269, 13 November 1935, Page 7

FLYING SOUTH.

Miss Batten' on the Way to Senegal. FLIGHT TO SOUTH AMERICA. (Received 11.30 a.m.) LONDON, November 12. ' Miss Jean Batten, who landed at Casablanca yesterday afternoon after a one-day hop from Lympnc, Kent, on her projected flight to South America, took off again to-day. She is reported as having passed over Villacisneros, the seaport of Rio do Oro, at 1.30 p.m. (Greenwich mean time) en route to Senegal.

ATLANTIC AIR ROUTE.

INTO STRATOSPHERE.

British and Irish Delegates For Ottawa. STRONG OFFICIAL INTEREST. (Received 11.30 a.m.) LONDON, November 12. A delegation comprising important British political, postal and air officials will leave for Ottawa to-morrow in order to discuss with the Canadian authorities the- projected establishment of a transatlantic service. Tlio Irish Free State and Newfoundland are also sending representatives to the conference. The party from Britain comprises Sir Ronald Banks, Director-General of the Post Office; Lieutenant-Colonel F. C. Shelmerdine, Director of Civil Aviation; and Mr. Woods-Humphrey, managing director of Imperial Airways, Limited. They are accompanied by officials of the Air Ministry, the Dominions Office and the Post Office.

Thrilling Balloon Ascent in America. OVER EIGHT HOURS ALOFT. NEW YORK, November 12. A message from White Lake, South Dakota, says the gentle landing by the world's largest balloon in a field near there late yesterday successfully ended a venture into the stratosphere to an unofficially recorded altitude of 14 miles, by Captains Alberta Stevens and Orvil Anderson, United States Army airmen. If later calibrations sustain the barometric computations of 74,000 ft, the flyers have won the world's altitude record. They had waited %ix weeks for favourable weather. The two officers surpassed by 2000 ft the hitherto unequalled but never officially recognised record claimed for three Russian airmen whose venture last year ended in their deaths. The flight, lasted 8 hours 13 minutes. There was an anxious moment just before the landing, when the occupants wirelessed that the huge balloon and gondola, with an overall height equivalent to that of a 31-storey building, was plunging downward at a rate of 500 ft a minute. At a height of 23,000 ft, for several frenzied moments, the two men tossed out ballast, thus checking the downward rush. At 1000 ft from the earth they threw out their scientific instruments on parachutes. For half an hour, at the pinnacle of their ascent, as they were sealed in the 9ft metal gondola, the flyers had made rapid scientific observations. Above and beyond them stretched black infinity. The temperature was 08 degrees below zero around the balloon and 19 degrees above inside. The officers operated a spectograph, a stratoscope and cosmic ray recorders and took pictures of the earth. The flight was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the United States Army Air Corps.