MODERN BUSINESS TRAVEL

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21707, 14 February 1936, Page 14

MODERN BUSINESS TRAVEL

20,000 MILES IN EIGHT

WEEKS

A DRAMATIC MESSAGE IN MID-AIR

(FROM oca OWN CORRESPONDENT.) SYDNEY, February 5. Mr Eric Dare, a Sydney business man, who returned a few days ago by a mail aeroplane, after travelling more than 20,000 miles by air on a business tour lasting only eight weeks, had a dramatic narrative to tell of the receipt of the news of King George’s death while he was homeward bound in a Dutch airmail aeroplane. “We were flying at a height of 16,000 feet above the Arabian Sea,” he said, “when a small Morse message that flung sorrow wherever it was heard, came through the receiver, It was a tense and tragic moment, when, high up in a cloudless sky, the wireless crackled out its fateful words: ‘The King is dead.’ Although we knew that the King was ill, this terse, sad note of finality to a notable career appalled us all, and we all stood, most of us with tears in our eyes, while the great Douglas aeroplane roared on. “From then on, the only conversation was about the King—either the King just dead or the King now living. At one place we saw guns being fired for the dead monarch, and at another, thousands of miles further on, we looked down on the smoke of guns being fired to acknowledge the accession of King Edward. At every point at Which we landed the residents met us wearing mourning, no matter what their or nationality. It made us realise the immensity of the bonds of Empire.” Such is the speed c. modern business travel that, although Mr Dare was away from Australia for only eight weeks, he was able to spend five of them in England and on the Continent, transacting and concluding important business during the time normally taken to reach London from Sydney tv the quickest means other than aeroplane. By Air Everywhere Mr Dare travelled by air everywhere he went. He told how an aeroplane in which he was travelling from Marseilles to Amsterdam was guided by wireless signals from the ground for more than 500 miles through a fog so dense that the passengers could barely see the wing tips. The aeroplane left Marseilles, he said, early in the morning, and after three-quarters of an hour became enveloped in fog. For more than three hours the pilot was enabled to steer an unerring course towards Rotterdam, where the fog was lifting. The aeroplane flew out of the fog into clear air about 250 feet above that city, rnd when further reports were received from below that it would be safe to continue to Amsterdam, the journey was completed. The passengers and crew probably owed their lives to the efficiency of the link between the ground organisation and the aeroplane. '

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