SARGASSO OF THE SKIES

Evening Star, Issue 22723, 10 August 1937, Page 11

SARGASSO OF THE SKIES

PLANES VANISH INTO THIN AIR No trace has been found of a number of aeroplanes, which, in the past few months, have been reported missing. It seems that they have van- . ished into thin air,” says a writer in ‘ Reynolds’ Newspaper.’ Is that phrase a mere figure of speech, or a scientific statement of fact? Daring pilots who have disappeared, courageous pioneers of the stratosphere who have been swallowed up by the skies, are not with us to tell the story. Are we to conclude, therefore, that there is a Sargasso of the air? The sea has its Sargasso, a seemingly fantastic area of closely-packed weed about which a dozen tales, apparently incredible, have been told. Seafarers for centuries have believed that in its unpluinbed depths are whole armadas of Spanish hulks, their sides bursting with the stolen jewels of Mexico and the Indies, frigates whose decks ran with blood when the skull and crossbones flew from their mains, and a thousand other craft of all rigs and eras. . . • Scientists have ridiculed this theory. But they admit that strange happenings may have occurred in the Sargasso. At the same time these men, who must have the tiniest details of their work proved and tabulated, arc investigating another and still stranger sea—the stratosphere. One January morning in 1931 three Russian scientists set off from Moscow to explore the stratosphere. Their gondola was of stainless steel, with her-raetically-sealcd windows, and their balloon was a gigantic globe of speci-ally-tested fabric of tremendous strength. Ordinary aeronauts register their altitude in feet; when the three Russians broadcast a report of their progress they gave it in their equivalent of our English miles. Ten, eleven, twelve miles they rose, and still reassuring messages came to their fellow scientists on the earth far beneath them. Twelve and a-half miles was reported, and those listening knew that soon their comrades should be descendinn-. The balloonists had broken every record. But after the last triumphant message came—silence. A hundred aeroplanes soared into the sky, a dozen airships floated cigar-like above the Soviet, and everywhere on earth men started searching. Their quest was fruitless. . One more message came from the sky. Two hundred miles from Moscow a radio operator picked up a faint signal: . . , “ Attention! Attention! Sinus speaking. Stratostat caught in zone of atmospheric precipitation. Gondola covered with ice. We are in a hopeless situation. We are falling. Two comrades in bad condition.”. And the silence once more. The three Russian scientists had been destroyed by a Sargasso of the air. More recently we have the gallant “ Smithy,” Australia’s pride, who disappeared somewhere over tho Bay of Bengal. Tho official account of tho tragedy reads more like a fairy story a staid bureaucratic document. On November 6 Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and J. T. Pethybridge left Lympne on a flight to Australia, and, after a halt at Athens, flew on to Allahbahad. On November 8 they passed over Calcutta. Later they were seen over the Bay of Bengal. After that, not a trace was found of them or their machine, though a squadron of tho R.A.F. searched for days.