HINKLER’S FLIGHT

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 8

HINKLER’S FLIGHT

Hinkler’s flight to Australia in a machine which is comparable in motoring to a light run-about car on the road has caught the imagination of the public. He has flown to India in a little over a week, on an expenditure in running costs of a trifle over twenty pounds, a feat which apparently has changed the whole perspective of long-distance air journeys. There still lies before him long and uncertain sea spaces, in the crossing of which disaster may befall, but what he has already accomplished has brought home to the public a clearer conception of the strides that engineering science, allied to human skill in flying and navigation, have made in aerial transport. With Colonel Lindbergh, of America, Hinkler is demonstrating that flying is as safe as motoring, given the machine, and the knowledge and skill. Each flies without a companion, acting on the ancient aphorism that “he travels fastest who rides alone.” Lindbergh has just completed a circuit of the United States, Mexico, and Cuba on a time-table from which he has rarely failed to depart, and then only a mere matter of a few hours.. Hinkler, so far, has kept remarkably to his time-table of the England-Australia flight, demonstrating that with well-defined stages and ample margins of fuel limits, it is almost as easy to fly halfway round the world in an aerial run-about machine as it is for a man in a light car to travel from Wellington to Auckland.

Achievements of this kind may be expected in time to popu-. larise flying as a national pastime, for the knowledge of what a light machine, well within the means of the average man whose income permits the luxury of a good car, can do when extended over a long distance, lends an assuring confidence in its capacity for recreative flights within fess ambitious boundaries.