800 MILES AN HOUR

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 124, 21 November 1929, Page 28

800 MILES AN HOUR

EXPERT'S PREDICTION

Hundred-ton air liners, carrying 200 persons, and flying, at a speod of»800 miles an hour, at a 25-mile altitude, were predicted within a few years by Mr. Igor Sikorsky, the aircraft builder and designer, in a speech at New York, says the "Daily Telegraph." *

In the more immediate futuro Sikorsky saw the establishment of a 36----hour Trans-Atlantic air service with the aid of a sea-drum raft which is now being financed and would, when completed, bo anchored in mid-ocean to afford giant 'planes means to refuel and get their bearings by radio beams. Practically all the technical problems standing in the way of the realisation of his predictions are being rapidly overcome, the designer said, and it would be only a matter of time before huge ships of the air were built and equipped with instruments and sufficient power to eliminate all hazards of storm and fog. The obstacle which prevents aeroplanes reaching a stratum twenty-five miles above the earth, where spoeds of 800 miles £n-hour or more were possible, Sikorsky. said,, was the falling of the air pressure within the craft, and this, he contended, would soon be overcome by hermetically sealing both the passenger and the engine compartments and by artificially maintaining a normal air pressure.