The Evening Star FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 1928. AVIATION’S COST.

Evening Star, Issue 19763, 13 January 1928, Page 4

The Evening Star FRIDAY, JANUARY 13, 1928. AVIATION’S COST.

As a result of the attempt of the New Zealand airmen, Moncrieff and Hood, whose fate is still in doubt, to cross the Tasman Sea, two questions which have been troubling Europe and America for half a year have inevitably been given a new stimulus. The first is, why attempt such flights? But that question will only puzzle staid and most unenterprising minds. Han is an adventurous animal. All his triumphs over Nature and the brute creation have been won by taking risks, and, while the vitality of his kind persists lie will continue to take thorn, They will have their own attraction, amounting frequently loan irresistible compulsion, for the young Since a new power has come within man’s control he will explore the air as in the past be explored the seas and the continents, conquered both at the cost of precious lives. The Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean and the North Polo have all been crossed by air. Someone bad to bo first to cross the Tasman. If the worst has happened to our Now Zealand aviators —we can hope still that it has not—they will merely have paid the price of a beginning. ' A more subtle question is involved in that of the control of such flights. Should adventurous men, who are the salt of the race, he allowed to choose their own risks, or should these be regulated for them by the general prudence of the community? And what is the value, ii any, of such flights when they fail? For eight men who succeeded in Hying across the Atlantic last year twenty lives were lost in long-distance flights, and seven more in preparing for them. The record has been the same, for a commencement, in all domains of progress. To forbid men to attempt long-distance flights until all the difficulties of such journ eys had been mastered would resemble the old injunction to the child not to go near the water till lie had learned to swim. A writer in an American journal has been considering the whole question dispassionately. The airmen themselves, he declares, consider the losses in their ventures as all part of the game, and resent any suggestion of forbidding hazardous flights. They point out that when Orville Wright made his first flight at Kittyhawk he took chances far beyond those faced by any ocean flyer. He did not know how to fly, nor did he know that his ship would fly, and the ocean racers know both. His home-made engine was so weak it could barely keep tho shin in the air at thirty-five to forty miles an hour, and every flyer knows that safety lies iu speed, for the slow, lumbering ’plane is at the mercy of every air gust and every air pocket. A regulation against hazardous flying would have kept Wright, Santos Dumont, Bleriot, Glenn Curtiss, and nil tho rest of the pioneers out of the air.

But that does not eml the question. Wo have passed the first stages of aviation, it may 'veil be contended that sufficient is known of it now to allow decision to be made as to ivbat are, and are not, reasonably sale craft for the ■ attempting of ocean flights, and for checks to bo applied to nn necessary venturesomeness. Aviation .leaders, wo are told, are generally agreed on a number of the lessons learned, including the following:—Abolishing the use of land ’planes for long flights over water. The necessity for multi-motored ’planes, capable of carrying on with at least half their engines out of commission; complete radio-sending and receiving equipment for every longdistance flyer, with a competent radio operator in charge; improvement of both navigation and flying instruments, and competent aerial navigation for every long flight; better weather reports covering conditions along the sea routes. But the experts can differ extremely among themselves. In relation to this latest trans-Tasman attempt, for example, Sir Keith Smith finds himself confirmed in his conviction that it should not have been undertaken except with an amphibian, while Major De Havilland, whose name is identical with that of a famous type of aircraft, and who had the advantage of seeing Moncrieff and Hood’s machine, thought it mofet suitable for the flight. If an expert wireless man had been one of the latest flyers present searchers almost certainly would have had a much better idea of where to look for them than they have to-day. With regard to the relative values of different types of craft, however, more has been learned from the failures of flyers. than from successful exploits. The motor car, it is recalled, has been built on the lessons of its own faults, when driven to destruction, and the same is true of every other piece of machinery that has reached a high state of evolution. So it is- reasonable to assume that the lessons of disaster in aviation may, in the end, outweigh the rewards of success, and in that sense even the heavy toll of life maJf have advantages for its progress.