TRIP TO WAR ZONE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 294, 12 December 1935, Page 20

TRIP TO WAR ZONE.

SETBACK FOR AVIATRIX.

MEDITERRANEAN DANGERS,

(From Our Own Correspondent.)

LOS ANGELES, November 20,

Recently, ready on an hour's notice to depart for Addis Ababa "if she could get a reporter to go," Miss Bessie Owen, Santa Barbara wealthy aviatrix, obtained the services of a co-pilot, Fred Noringer, who expected to act also as mechanic, but there still is a catch in her plans. Miss Owen has in her possession a letter from the Department of State in Washington refusing her permission to fly in the unsetled war clouds of the Italo-Ethiopian conflict. She was ready to sail to the Orient with her crated four-passenger Waco cabin 'plane when she received the wrong answer to her request for visas.

At the time of the application Miss Owen, recent winner of the Los AngelesSan Diego women's air race, planned three alternate routes from India to Paris, to which the Department said it had "given careful consideration and is forced to conclude that it is inadvisable for you to fly while the present uncertainty exists in the Mediterranean area."

And this, unless the wealthy aviatrix, who also plans to take Mittens, a wandering cat slie adapted when she found it a stowaway in her 'plane, obtains Government permission, is what she will miss: A steamer trip to Shanghai, Paris in the spring, glimpses of China and Indo-China, Siam, Burma, India, Baluchistan, Persia, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Tunis, Algeria and Morocco.