MAILS “ON THE WING”

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 81, 30 December 1931, Page 8

MAILS “ON THE WING”

Problem for Air Liners Collecting air mail while “on the wing” has provided a perplexing problem (says the “Christian Science Monitor”). The railway train, speeding a mile a minute, makes little of the task of scooping a mailbag from the arm of the post which bears it, but serving the aeroplane presents new difficulties. There are no aerial posts from which the mailbags may be suspended. And the corner of a fleecy cloud- would fall to sustain the weight of even one letter. So far no elevator service to overhead aeroplanes has been developed, and light control has not been carried to a point at which pink, blue or violet rays may be made to act as porters to mailbags. A learned astronomer forecasts the possibility that a red ray, employing an infinitesimal short wave, may yet travel the 35,000,000 miles between the earth and Mars, but he does not say whether the ray will have any possibilities as a carrier of mails.

In the meanwhile, efforts to speed up the air-mail service are promoting research in the direction of picking up mail in the air. The transfer of mail from one aeroplane to another is said to incur the risk of upsetting the equilibrium of the “through plane.” Already a device has been developed which is said to catapult a mailbag through the air, at a speed of 70 miles an hour, thereby minimising the shock to the aeroplane in the pick-up. A shower of mailbags instead of meteors may yet disturb the calculations of the uninformed astronomer.