A FLIGHT WITHOUT A COMPASS

Evening Star, Issue 22881, 12 February 1938, Page 8

A FLIGHT WITHOUT A COMPASS

A “ pilot ” has crossed the Atlantic fi'om Denmark to the Barbados without wireless, without a compass, and without petrol. The pilot is a tern, which was ringed in Denmark and came to hand in the Barbados just 40 days later. As the distance is about 4,800 miles the bird must have travelled 120 miles a day. We have no record of the route and the tern has kept no log book, but the bird can easily do the dailv flight in from four to five hours, so that it probably went by the Canary Islands, and from thence was driven across the rest of the way by the winds. Terns have appeared in the Barbados fairly frequently, but this is, we believe, the first time that a ringed bird has enabled the time and the beginning and end of the journey to be checked.

American Museum of Natural History, we should never know how fast it .goes. But according to the museum’s director, Dr Roy Chapman Andrews, its speed is 400 yards a second. Putting this into miles, Dr Andrews remarks that if Cephenomyia, whose commoner name is the deer botfly, could keep np its speed of 818 miles an hour it could get round the world, along the route usually marked out for aeroplanes, in 17 hours. It moves twice as fast as the Schneider Trophy planes, and, if it could not quite overtake a bullet, sound could not catch it up. The female is not so fast ns the male, but her speed of 300 yards a second would still leave the sound waves behind. Cephenomyia’s performances have led Dr Andrews to draw up a table of the