MYSTERY AEROPLANE

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXI, Issue 307, 11 December 1931, Page 6

MYSTERY AEROPLANE

FLYING IN UPPER AIR. TREMENDOUS SPEED CLAIMED. London, November 29. Tho Paris correspondent of the Referee states that an amazing mystery aeroplane, which has been built to the order of the French Air Ministry and will shortly take the air, may make all existing machines as obsolete as horse eabs. It is a medium-sized monoplane, with a normal ground speed of 150 miles an hour, but is specially adapted to ascend 12 to 15 miles, and to fly in the upper strata at from 200.t0 500 miles an hour, thus bringing New York within six hours of Paris. The pilot and mechanic will be enclosed in an airtight, heated duralumin cylinder, but must fly blind, as the tiny windows are certain to bo frosted over by the intense cold. Tho controls are operated through padded padded joints. The Air Ministry is confident that its technicians have evolved an alloy capable of preventing intense cold from eracking tho strongest steel like china. The unknown factor, it declares, is not tho aeroplane’s performance, but the weather in the stratosphere. Some meteorologists surmise that in the upper strata there is a perpetual calm, while others predict terrific storms and 200-mile an hour gales, making high flying impossible. If the flight is successful, tho pilots will fly in a region where the earth is spinning below, and time is suspended. The aeroplane at present stands in the original workshops of Fannan Brothers, in Paris. The engine is a Farinan 350 horse-power, with a triple, supercharged rotating mammoth propeller capable of doing 25,000 revolutions a minute. The Air Ministry would not permit the photographing of the machine.