The Hawera Star. MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1925. CIVIL AVIATION.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 26 January 1925, Page 4

The Hawera Star.

MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 1925. CIVIL AVIATION.

Delivered every evening by 0 o'clock m Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltham, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Awatuna, Opunake, Otakebo, Manutahi, Alton, Hurleyville, Patea, Waverley, Mokoia, Wbakamara, Ohangai, Mereinere, Fraser Road, and Ararat*.

The opening of the formal investigation into the Croydon air disaster will tend once again to focus public opinion on the field of civil aviation, upon the progress and development of which an accident of such magnitude must of necessity exercise a braking effect. When seven passengers go to their death in one crash, it is not surprising that the public should sit up and take notice; but it is no more than fair to set against the latest mishap at Croydon the wonderfully good record of commercial flying in Britain to date. It is only a little more than five years since the first “air express” crossed from London to Paris. Since that beginning, towards the close of the year 1919, transits have been made in constantly increasing numbers, until now the service is daily and flights are made with the regularity, and almost the safety, of steamer crossings of the Channel. In a recent magazine article, Mr Harry Harper, Technical Secretary of the Civil Transport Committee of Great Britain,' gives figures to show that, in the five years of their being, the air expresses have flown over five million miles, with a reliability figure, as regards arrivals and departures, of 91 per cent. They have carried in all nearly fifty thousand passengers, and of that total, until this latest disaster, only six had lost their lives. As Mr Harper puts it: “This is a conclusive answer to the question, ‘Can flying be made safe?’ It can.” None can deny that it is a great record—a truly magnificent achievement when it is remembered that a bare score of years has passed since the Wright Brothers were the first to fly a heavier-tlian-air machie, and that the world stood openmounted within the memory almost of our schoolboys when Bleriot made the first cross-Channel flight. When war broke out, aviation as a whole was still in its experimental stage. The beardless youths who changed from flannels and football togs to leathern suits and goggles, then threw dice with Death thousands of feet above the enemy’s lines, changed all that. Some of them came home to the ’dromes each night at dusk; many did not; but, one and all, they carried the science of aviation far beyond the day of experiment. Yet it was only after the war that civil flying was cradled, and the five years which have intervened may be marked down as a period of infancy, a period which is perhaps not yet ended. To have achieved so much at so little cost in human life in the experimental days, is something of which British airmen may well bo proud. Thirty-five years were spent in bringing the railway engine to its present state of comparative perfection; twenty years were put into the development of the marine engine; fifteen have been spent in improving the motor car. But five years only has been time enough to bring commercial aviation to its position to-day. Mr Harper appears to umler-estimate the invaluable service rendered to aviation generally by the break-neck speed of war expansion; but he is right in stressing that the development then was in one direction only—that the world was forced to run upon the air, before it had properly learned to walk —and there is probably something in liis claim that “had it not been for the war, with its abnormal development of aviation in extreme directions, commercial flying would (during its pioneer phase) have been a slower, surer, and, from a business point of view, probably a far more satisfactory movement.” Be that as it may, wonderful progress is being made as things are, and the possibilities of the future are quite beyond man’s ken. It may be —more’3 the pity!—

that Tennyson’s dream of the heavens filled with commerce, “argosies of magic sails,’’ will materialise before the companion, but infinitely finer, vision of the day when the war-drum shall throb no longer and *tlie battleflags be furl’d.