EARLY FLYING DAYS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22580, 19 November 1936, Page 8

EARLY FLYING DAYS

SIR ROBERT CLARK-HALL TOO MANY NEW INVENTIONS Reminiscences of aviation since 1910 ■were given at a luncheon of the Christchurch Business Men's Club b< AirMarshal Sir Robert Clark-Hall. Sir Robert said that he had first attended a flying meeting in Germany in J 910. There had been four or five entries, but only two machines had managed to get into the air. The pilot of that time, he said, "looked like a thrush in a birdoage."

AVhen Sir Robert returned from his stay in Germany, he said, he had found that the navy had begun to experiment. However, he learned to fly privately, in .a Bristol "Box-kite." "There were no dual-flying machines then," he said, "and the pupil had to lean over the instructor's shoulder to work the joystick. "A recognised test in 1911 was to get up at dawn, and light a match in the middle of the aerodrome. If tho match went out, you went back to bed."

Sir Robert thought he was the first passenger to be taken on a night flight. He said there had been competition to be a holder of oue of the first hundred licences issued, but his had been number 127. "If I had been walking with a seer 2-5 years ago," Sir Robert sjiid, "and ■we had passed a baby, whose name the seer told me was Clark, and that he would fly the Tasman in 25 years' time, I would not have believed him. "The world is suffering from indigestion of clever inventions, which we do not know how to manage," concluded Sir Robert. "We do not want more inventions and material things, but more time should be given to things of the mind and spirit."