THE AOTEAROA ARRIVES
Sydney to Auckland in half the time it takes the limited express to travel from Auckland to Wellington ; Southampton to Auckland in about a third of the time occupied by the normal steamer passage —that, in brief, was the amazing performance of the flying-boat Aotearoa when she alighted on the Waitemata Harbour yesterday afternoon. Aucklanders assembled in force for a welcoming glimpse of the huge machine bearing the rippling nativp name of the land which she has been built to serve and there could have been few who did not grasp the significance of the occasion. A few hours earlier those people had been anxiously studying columns of print from which they sensed ominous echoes of rumblings along the frontiers of Europe; from which, too, they gained mental pictures of huge armadas of the skies, prepared for a deadly struggle. And then, out of a sombre pall of rain clouds, appeared the silver wings of the Aotearoi; approaching the appointed end of a journey of peace. There was tho thought, too, of the impending arrival of another flying-boat, winging southward across the Pacific, and the knowledge that once again powerful aircraft representing two great nations would lie side by side on the harbour, bearing witness to the mutual desire of the British and American peoples that the air should be free for the peaceful commerce of the world. In times like the present speedy communication between Great Britain and the most distant of her Dominions is a matter of the utmost importance and the triumphant arrival of the first of the flying-boats for the Tasman service gave a striking demonstration of how this dream of five years' standing is shortly to be realised. All concerned deserve congratulations 011 tho completion of what in probably the longest delivery flight ever made and accompanying those congratulations will be the confident hope that the commercial service soon to be inaugurated will fulfil all expectations^
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Bibliographic details
New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23437, 29 August 1939, Page 8
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324THE AOTEAROA ARRIVES New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23437, 29 August 1939, Page 8
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