Business Flight of Over 20,000 Miles

Manawatu Times, Volume 61, Issue 44, 22 February 1936, Page 13

Business Flight of Over 20,000 Miles

NEWS OF KING’S DEATH TENSE MOMENT IN MID-AIR SYDNEY, Feb. 5. A Sydney business man, Mr Eri« Dare, who returned a few days ago by air mail aeroplane, after travelling more than 20,000 miles by air on a business tour lasting only eight weeks, had a dramatic narrative to tell of the receipt of the news of King George’s death while he was homeward bound in a Dutch machine. “We were flying at a height of 16,000 feet above the Arabian Sea,” he said, ‘ 'when a small Morse message that flung sorrow wherever it was heard, came through the receiver. It was a tense and tragic moment, when, high up in a cloudless sky, the wireless crackled out the fateful words: ‘The King is Dead.’ Although we knew that the King was ill, this terse, sad note of finality to a notable career appalled us, and we all stood, most of us with tears in our eyes, while the great Douglas aeroplane roared on. “From then on, the only conversation was about the King—either the King just dead, or the new King. At one place we saw guns being fired for the dead Monarch, and at another, thousands of miles further on, we looked down on the smoko of guns being fired to acknowledge the accession of King Edward. At every point at which we landed the residents met us wearing mourning, no matter what their colour or nationality. It made us realise the immensity of the bonds of Empire.” Such is the speed of modern business travel that, although Mr Dare was away from Australia for only eight weeks, he was able to spend five of them in England and on the Continent, transacting and concluding important business during the time normally taken to reach London from Sydney by the quickest means other than aeroplane. He told how a machine in which he was a passenger from Marseilles to Amsterdaam was guided by wireless signals from the ground for more than 500 miles through a fog so denso that the passengers could barely see the wingtips. The machine left Marseilles, he said, early in the morning, and after threequarters of an hour became enveloped in fog. For more than three hours the pilot was.enabled to steer an unerring course toward Rotterdam, where the fog was lifting. The aeroplane flew out of the fog into clear sky about 250 ft. above that, city, and when further reports were received from below thgt it would be safe to continue to Amsterdam, the journey was completed. The passengers and the crew possibly owed theirjives to the efficiency of the link between the ground organisation and the machine.