NOTED PILOT

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 154, 1 July 1944, Page 6

NOTED PILOT

CAPTAIN J. C. MERCER

PIONEERING FLIGHTS I

(0.C.)

CHRISTCHURCH, this day,

About 37 years ago in "men were never meant to fly" days, a gas-filled balloon rose from the open fields and hovered some 200 ft up. Appended was a crazy "Basket"—a bicycle wheel with canvas around it, and a bicycle rim for a top—containing a young man who appeared to be less uncertain in the air than the balloon itself. The young man who paid his shilling for this precarious flight was John Cuthbert Mercer, who was to become one of New Zealand's greatest pioneers in the field of civil aviation. This was Captain Mercer's initiation in aeronautics, in association with "Bob" Murie at Invercargill in 1908.

Captain Mercer had 12,000 flying hours to his credit. It was estimated that he had flown in his time 1,250,000 miles, equal to 50 flights around the earth. He spent more of his life aloft than any other airman in the Dominion.

He secured his flying "ticket" in 1917 as a pilot of Canterbury Aviation Company's school, founded by Sir Henry Wigram to train pilots for service in the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War, instead of being sent overseas. He was retained as instructor, training many New Zealanders who achieved distinguished records in France. After the' war the school was converted into a business; and aeroplanes were used for "barnstorming" and "joy riding," the flight being given often from paddocks quite unprepared as aerodromes in nearly every centre of population .in Canterbury. Pioneer Aviation Work The Canterbury Aviation Company inaugurated in January 1921, a mail | and passenger air .service between Christchurch and Timaru. The service lasted only two months through lack- of patronage, and the Government took over the machines and aerodrome as the start of the infant New Zealand Air Force. _ , _ Captain Mercer then joined the New Zealand Aero Transport Company, founded by Mr. R. L. Wigley, of the Mount. Cook Company, with headquarters in Timaru. Captain Mercer made one of the earliest flights across Cook Strait from Blenheim to Lyall Bay on November 21,