LIBYA INCIDENT

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 210, 2 June 1936, Page 9

LIBYA INCIDENT

British Air Liner Crew

Arrested

UNDER ARMED GUARD

Report of Brutal Treatment By Italians By Telegraph—Press Assn.—Copyright. (Received June J, 7.50 p.m.) London, June 1. The Foreign Office is investigating a report of brutal treatment of Captain Walter Rogers, a leading Imperial Airways pilot, and his crow of three. The “Daily Herald” says that Captain Rogers, flying the 38-seater plane Hanno to Cairo, there being no passengers, for service in the Near East, landed at Mesylam, Libya. The crew was immediately placed under an armed guard and the documents seized. The four men were quartered in an inadequate tent in blazing sun with an armed native guard outside. It is alleged that Captain Rogers and the crew were afterward paraded as objects of derision at the bayonet point before Italian native troops. When the I-lanno’s papers were found to be perfectly in order, the Italians complained that the machine had been seen flying over a prohibited military area, which was actually the route Italy chooses for British machines to follow. Captain Rogers was afterward allowed to go to Cairo without explanation. The incident is the more astonishing as the Italian Government, Army and Air Force are normally very friendly with British aviators. Captain Walter Rogers le one of Imperial Airways' senior pilots, with a flying record approaching 10,000 hours. Born in London 41 years ago, he ran away from home and an engineering apprenticeship and joined the army in 1913. One of the “Old Contemptibles,” he saw considerable service with the infantry before he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and gained his “wings” in 1917. As a sergeant pilot he won the Air Force Medal. After demobilisation in 1920 he joined Handley-Page Transport Ltd., a pioneer air transport firm which turned out to be a nursery for many of the foremost air pilots of to-day, and has been flying ever since. When Imperia] Airways was formed in 1924 he was one of their original pilots, being taken over from the Handley-Page concern, and has been with them on Continental and Imperial routes ever since. , , . “Rogers is one of those stout-hearted pioneers of civil aviation about whom we hear too little, considering that we owe them so much,” it lit*’ been said. “Theirs was Ihe task of proving to a doubting

world the value of an aeroplane as a means of transport and in doing so they performed feats of bad-weather flying on the old London-Paris route without wireless and weather reports and with machines and engines indifferently reliable compared to those in use to-day, which eend a cold shudder down tlie back of the latter-day pilot, even to contemplate. Captain Rogers lives for his profession and has no other hobby than it. One ot his children is named “Handley” after his former chief, and his home near Croydon airport is named “Le Bourget, no doubt in memory of those early days of the London-Paris airway when the happiest sight which tlie pilots could see was Le Bourget airport, a very welcome home after many an adventurous trip. He is also renowned as one of the wits of the pilots’ room at Croydon, one of his prize stories being that of bow he came to acquire a certain magnificent Afghan decoration awarded to him by exKing Amanullah after a successful flight to his kingdom. His flying hours, too, he asserts boldly, “are real hours completed in the air and not dream hours completed after a lobster supper.”