ZEPPELINS OVER PACIFIC

Greymouth Evening Star, 8 August 1936, Page 10

ZEPPELINS OVER PACIFIC

AMBITIOUS JAPANESE PLANS

LONDON, June 12.

Japanese plans to rival United States commercial air expansion in the Pacific, particularly by means of a competitive trans-Oceanic service by giant dirigibles of the Grat Zeppelin and Hindenburg type, are expected to become actualities in the near future.

A supplementary scheme for a network of Japanese ’plane services connecting Japan with her mandated islands and into the East Indies and the South Pacific have a direct interest to Australia, New Zealand and the Empire. The five-day dirigible service between Vancouver and Tokio became a possibility of the near future last month, with the announcement of the formation of a new Japanese company capitalised at more than £ 3,000,00 b.

It is Japan’s first major experiment in lighter-than-air craft, and the first step towards competition with American air enterprises in the Far East. Using two giant dirigibles similar to the Graf Zeppelin and' Hindenburg now flying the Atlantic, the new company called tin- Eastern Hemisphere Airways Company, Ltd., will enter into direct competition with the clipper ships of the Pan-American Airways, it was disclosed in reports from Tokio to the “San Francisco Chronicle.”

Baron Sakatani, president of the Imperial Japanese Aviation Society, is said to have given financial aid to the new trans-Pacific enterprise.

Airships will be purchased in Germany rather than, constructed in Japan, according to the information received. In addition to its bid for trans-Pacific transportation business, the new company will extend its service deep into the Orient,

Plans are also being made, reports stated, to exploit commercial air routes into the South Pacific, using high-i/owered commercial airplanes, the lines cutting directly across the present route of the Pan-American Airways to the Orient.

The South Pacific venture has the sanction of the Japanese Ministry of Communications, it is said, and advices from Japan state that the 70-

year-old Minister of the department, Tancmogi, will personally lead the first flight, to be made with a Japanese naval plane, within the next, few weeks.

The Naval Minister, Admiral Osumi Nagano, indicated that he may go as a passenger on the same flight, which will touch ai the mandated islands, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Siam.

'1 he commercial invasion of the Orient and the South Pacific by PanAmerican Airways’ clipper ships stirred the Japanese into this now activity in commercial aviation, it was said, the Japanese army and navy having adopted a policy recently of making the public “air-minded” to encourage the development of civilian aviation.

The, clipper ships cut across Japan’s “life line of-existence” by the invasion of the South Pacific, Japanese spokesmen declared. Experimental flights have been completed successfully by PanAmerican .Airways, and the first passenger airway across the Pacific is due to start shortly. Thus a simple sentence sums up a gigantic achievement, years of patient planning. Pan-American Airways have pioneered the world’s longest sea route — the nine thousand miles of ocean separating San Francisco and Hong Kong. Four years of planning, four years of wrestling with technical difficulties which seemed 1 insuperable. That is the story.

America attaches the greatest commercial importance to this airway to the East. Pan-Americans hope to transform little-known islands in the Pacific into rich .men’s playgrounds, where they can fish and forget. Last November the great plan came into practical being. The first Martin clipper, piloted by Captain Musick, landed at Manila, the capital of the; Philippines, SOOD miles from the American mainland, in 60 hours’ flying after “an uneventful voyage.”