AIRCRAFT PLANS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 183, 4 August 1936, Page 9

AIRCRAFT PLANS.

NEW GUINEA 'PLANE. ASSEMBLING IN MELBOURNE.) FLIGHTS IN CANNIBAL LAND. 1 i j- (From Our Own Correspondent.) j ' LOS ANGELES, July 15. ; I The speediest mail service which I America and England have to ofler, together with the best that the Queen j Mary could do, were invoked in the air-, craft manufacturing Burbank suburb of Los Angeles when Lockheed officials put a packet of blue prints aboard the TWA Sky Chief for. New York. j The blue prints were plans for assem-, bling a Lockheed Electra which has been, en route to Australia since June 27.1 These plans had to reach Melbourne by 1 , the end of the month, so that the purchasers, the Guinea Airways, could put their aeroplane into operation at once, j The packet travelled across the Atlan-1 tie on the new palatial steamer the Queen Mary. From London it was to i be taken aboard a London-Imperial i Airways aeroplane due to arrive I in Melbourne on July 28, a few I hours before the freighter bearing the Electra across the Pacific Ocean docked in Sydney. Purchased for service from Australia to the New Guinea goklfields, the Lockheed will transport heavy mining equip- | merit piece by piece across "cannibal j infested territory," it was stated in Los I Angeles, with the added intimation: "Eight parties attempted to get through the same territory last year, and all were lost, so flying has become the sole method of transportation in that part of the world." i Gold Quest in Jungles. j A new British-American syndicate soon will be formed to mine placer gold ' from deepest, head-hunting New Guinea, i according to Mr. Stanley Johnston, pros- '■ pector, of Australia, who arrived in Los j Angele6 aboard tie Mariposa. After a

few days in Los Angeles lie proposed to hurry on to New York to sail thence for London. Mr. Johnston, who said lie had already found rich sands in Papua, declared he lias concessions from Australia and Holland to prospect for gold and oil far in the interior, where last year a patrol found two strange races. One was white, of fair skin and light hair and of stocky build; the other black and of Semitic features, who excelled at bartering. Not one-fifth of the country's 300,000 | square miles has been prospected, lie ! said, due to malaria and to savage tribes. Of the strange race of white men found last year lie quoted their discoverers, Messrs. Jack Hides, a magistrate, and T. O'Mallev, a patrol officer: "They avoid intermarriage by'yearly inviting single males of one tribe for a three-day party with maids of another," he said. "When the party is over the meu take home new wives. Who-n they want j divorces all they have to do is cast them j off!"