CAPTAIN TAYLOR'S ADVOCACY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 130, 5 June 1939, Page 9

CAPTAIN TAYLOR'S ADVOCACY

The experimental flight upon which Captain P. G. Taylor has set out is a flying venture which he has long advocated, but until the beginning of this year his enthusiasm had failed to secure financial support.

Captain Taylor was navigator and copilot with the late Sir Charles Kingsford Smith on several of the ocean flights of the Southern Cross, and with Kingsford Smith he made that crazy but brilliantly successful trans-Pacific flight in a single-engined Lockheed plane which was entered for but barred from the Melbourne Centenary Air Race in i 934. With Kingsford Smith again, he was the hero of the last attempted crossing of the Tasman in the Southern Cross, when the old machine turned back to Sydney with one engine dead and another kept going by oil hand-fed by Taylor, hanging on to its mounting struts. Captain Taylor has had his share of trans-ocean stunting, but is far from a stunting pilot: his energies and interest have been directed for the last four- years at least to the establishment of a regular airline from Australia to England via the Indian Ocean, across Africa, and via the west coast of Africa to England, as a reserve route which would remain in operation through a European war.. 4 THE PRESENT ROUTE.

The Imperial Airways route is open to threat for a great part of its length, it is conceivable that under war conditions the overland crossing of France would be forbidden; on the long Mediterranean section, with calls at Rome, Brindisi, and Crete, war dangers would be extreme, and the Irak and Arabian stretches to India might be closed by internal- unrest or threats from the north. Rangoon, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies might be in a further great zone of interference. The Indian Ocean route lies far to the south of any possible interference from land-based planes of enemy countries, and though the total distance is great, 4500 miles, the way is stepped out by island groups, all British possessions.

From the nearest point of Western Australia, Onslow, the air distance to Cocos Island, to the north-west, is 1200 miles. West of Cocos is Diego Garcia, 1470 miles; west again are the Seychelles, 990 miles; and the final hop would be of 840 miles to Mombasa, on the present route of Imperial Airways African services. - From Mombasa the air line sketched by Captain Taylor would cross Africa, 1860 miles, over Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola to St. Paul da Loanda. Lagos (British Nigeria), Bathurst (British Gambia), Madeira (Portuguese), and Lisbon would step the distance up the coast of Africa and past European danger zones to England.

The Indian Ocean air route, it is contended, may have great defensive and strategical importance in assisting a naval patrol of the approaches to India, and could be of first importance in making possible a scheme of co-operation in air defence between Africa, India, and Australia.