Bolts From the Blue

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 34, 3 November 1934, Page 20

Bolts From the Blue

“The report that the R.A.U’. is fitting silencers to its latest night bombers is the sort of cheering news to interest civilians everywhere. What does it mean? “Chiefly it means that the defence against air attack, already largely powerless, is on its way to becoming entirely so. How does one defend oneself against an aeroplane, one can « neither see nor hear? “The trend towards silent flight is irresistible. Military aviation is benefiting by all the research carried out for civil purposes besides doing plenty of its own. “Each searchlight used in Britain's home defence to-day has a ‘sound locator,' without which it is largely blind. This machine receives the sound of the enemy’s engines, plots his approximate position and course and gives warning both to the searchlights and to the anti-aircraft guns. “It is said that the sound locators can hear hardly anything at all of machines fitted with the new silencers when they fly above 10,000 feet. Modern bombing may be done at 15,000 feet. It is one more macabre assurance for the wars of to-morrow.”