SYDNEY TO ADELAIDE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 65, 19 March 1925, Page 6

SYDNEY TO ADELAIDE

AUSTRALIAN AIR SERVICES,

(FKOH OUR OWN CORRESFOXIJEJtr.}

SYDNEY, 11th March. Although it would appear that of all countries in the world Australia has the most to gain by the use' of aeroplanes as a means of communication, aviation development in this country is painfully slow. The war, and ■ the feat of Ross and Keith Smith in flying from London to Sydney, showed the value of ■ the aeroplane—yet six. years:,:.have passed since then, and still our great distances are covered by the, old and slow methods.

Above one of the posting boxes at the Sydney Post Office is this legend, scrawled in ink on a piece of white cardboard : "Aerial Mail—South Australia." Thus officialdom takes reluctant cognisance of the' fact that, once each week, an aeroplane carrying mails and passengers leaves for Adelaide. It makes the round trip every week. A few hours' flying takes the 'plane from Sydney to Hay, where th? night is spent; another few hours, next day, brings the machine over Adelaide. Two days are occupied in a similar manner on the return trip. The aeroplane runs to a time-table, and the pilot—a wellknown flier, Lieutenant Briggs—knows his machine and his route so well that he keeps almost to "railway" running.

The mails are now—and have been for some years—carried over the north-west of West Australia by aeroplanes, and this service seems to have been very successful and ■ singularly free ■ from accidents. Hails also are distributed by aeroplanes in one or two remote districts of Queensland. And that about tells the whole tale. No one seems able to give a suitable explanation of the fact that commercial aviation has 1 languished in. Australia. This is a country where new settlement is definitely rendered difficult because of lack of conimunication. It is also a country of enormous flat surfaces, where there are no tricky air . currents, and where the weather lacks variability to a marked degree, so that the flying conditions are singularly safe. Flying is safe, and even comfortable, on 98 days in every hundr.ed in Australia. Certainly, it is move expensive to fly than to travel in a train or steamer, unless the saving in time be allowed to count; and it would appear that the great majority of travellers in this country do not mind wasting a day or two. The regular weekly service between Sydney and Adelaide crosses interesting country—that region where the borders of New South • Wales, Victoria, and South Australia meet, and where the Darling and Murrumbidgee Rivers join up to form the great Murray. Everyone who flies across, here exclaims over a remarkable thing. In Victoria,, and to a lesser extent in South Australia, the lands hereabout are closely settled and well and profitably cultivated. But this cultivation ceases abruptly on the banks of the Murray. On the New South Wales side there is virgin country, unsettled, practically a desert. . Victoria has railroaded and irrigated her lands: New South Wales has built nothing— not even a fair road. Vet the fertility of these vast regions is well known—even if Victoria was not there across the river to prove it. So much has been said about it that the responsible N.S.W. departments are wearily and irritably bestirrinstithemselves. Thus is the value of -the aeronlane being demonstrated as a pioneer of settlement.