MRS. PUTNAM'S VENTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 142, 17 June 1937, Page 8

MRS. PUTNAM'S VENTURE

With the world by this time fairly well mapped out with a network of air routes, it might be thought that there was little room left for the pioneer to blaze a new track. But this is what Mrs. Amelia Earhart Putnam, the American airwoman of international fame, is doing. Round-the-world flights are already on record, notably by the late Wiley Post, once with Mr. Harold Gatty as copilot, and again solo, but the route was entirely in the Northern Hemisphere, in latitudes medium to high, thereby shortening the distance. Mrs. Putnam is trying a new way through the tropics not far north of the Equator. Her first attempt, from east to west, starting from California, broke down in a bad take-off at Honolulu after the longest hop had been covered at the time the PanAmerican flying-boat set out to visit New Zealand. Mrs. Putnam

had her battered craft repaired and, reversing her direction, turned eastward. She left Miami, Florida, on ijune 1, crossed the Caribbean Sea, via the West Indian islands, skirled the north coast of South America with calls at airports on the way, until she came to Natal, Brazil, the hopping-off point for the South Atlantic crossing to West Africa. On June 7 she' made this crossing successfully, in 12 hours, to Dakar, on the African coast. Her route then lay across Africa over the wilderness where the Sudan meets the Sahara. This difficult section, too, she surmounted without serious mishap, and on June 14, after stops on the way, reached the Red Sea at Massowah, the capital of Italian East Africa. The next message from Karachi, India, dated June 15, reports her safe arrival there after a flight over the great Arabian Desert and the Persian Gulf, one of the most desolate and dangerous regions for aviators in the world, quite out of the track of regular airlines. From Karachi her course—if she follows her original plan in reverse—will lie over the Imperial Airways route to Darwin, thence to Lao, New Guinea, and so, via Polynesia, across the Pacific to Honolulu and back home. It will not be easy going, but the intrepid airwoman is already nearly half-way round the world in her novel venture. If she succeeds in the rest it will be a remarkable achievement.