SLIP-COACHES OF THE AIR.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3382, 11 July 1927, Page 2

SLIP-COACHES OF THE AIR.

So rapid is air progress that what was experimental yesterday is adopted as routine to-day. It was only recently that I saw an aeroplane pilot unhook himself, by means of an ingenious device, from below an airship 3,000 ft high and, after darting to and from in the vicinity, reattach his machine successfully to the apparatus, which resembles a trapeze. Now, already, experts are considering the details of winged tenders for regular use in connection with Empire airships operating between England, India, Australia and New Zealand. Such “clippers of the clouds” will fly thousands of miles without alighting, and it is with a view to handling intermediate traffic and passengers and mails from areas on either side of the route that this air-tender scheme is being developed. Neat, compact little “air-boats” are in design. Sitting out forward will be the flying sailor controlling the tiny craft on its trips either to take passengers up to join an airship in midair, or to glide down with those wishing to alight at some small air-station along the trunk line. Voyagers carried by the handy little machines wiJI sit in a small but comfortable saloon just behind the pilot’s cockpit, and there will be a compartment also for mails and urgent goods. When not in use the aerial tender will be slung beneath the airship’s keel, and passengers will enter or leave it through a sloping, covered-in pas-sage-way, like one of those flexible 1 vestibules connecting the coaches of corridor trains.

Wireless will be essential to the scheme. As a non-stop airship flies along the 10,000 miles separating the Mother Country from Australia, her wireless operator will receive messages from one after another of a series of groundstations. Some will give him weather news. Others will be routine traffic reports. Others, again, coming from some small station far ahead, will be to the effect that a traveller in haste is being sent up by air-tender to join the airship as she passes above. The passenger with his luggage will enter the air-boat as it stands on the ’drome. Then it will wing its way up till it is cruising in the path of _ the non-sop liner of the sky. The officers of the latter, peering out from 'the windows of their control car, will be on the look-out. 'Directly the air-tender is sighted the engine telegraphs of the sky-ship will ring, and she will slacken speed. As she does so, the pilot of the tender will manoeuvre into position so that the clip mechanism above his wings engages the .gear which members of the airship’s crew lower from the keel. Smartly, as soon as the attachment is made, the passenger and his baggage will be transferred from tender to airship. Then the little air-boat will oast off, and, its pilot waving farewell, will glide down gracefully earthward, while the great hying liner gathers speed again on her distance-devouring voyage above land and sea.