UNIVERSITY AIRMEN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20499, 29 August 1928, Page 9

UNIVERSITY AIRMEN.

OXFORD SQUADRON IX CAMP. (From Opr Own Correspondent.) LONDON, July 5. Members of the Oxford University Air Squadron are now, like the sister unit of Cambridge, on their usual attachment to a Royal Air Force station. Lender the chief instructor. Wing Commander A. G. R. Garrod, and with the aid of four additional instructors lent by the Royal Air Force, the unit is putting in 24 flying hours a day at Mansion Aerodrome. A total of 124 flying hours in the first week in camp was, in fact, thought good enough to justify a wireless signal to Cambridge, at Old Sarum, for the two units, to take interest in each other’s progress. Oxford has some leeway to make up, compared with Cambridge, not because the authorities at Oxford have been less alive to the importance of aviation, but because the service facilities for flying training did not exist until the opening of Upper Heyford Aerodrome last year. Since January, however, there has not only been flying in term, but Wing Commander Garrod and his permanent staff have been getting every one of the 75 members of the unit into the air once each week, a record which so far Cambridge has not been able to equal. Solo flying in term time has yet to come, but the Oxford University Squadron lias now come to annual attachment with two men who can be regarded as soloists, and when the two further batches of 25 have finished their fortnight’s training at Mansion it is almost certain that there will be 15 members proficient, with perhaps a half-hour’s refresher dual instruction flight at Upper Heyford to fly solo. The squadron paid a flying visit to Old Sarum, where the Oxford men met the Cambridge men at the station sports. As eight machines mustered Oxford made an imposing formation as it flew over the Home Counties to the west. —Mrs Mary Boist, who declared 4') years ago, in a fit of anger at her husband, that she would go to bed and remain there until death, has fulfilled her threat. She has died in her home at Montgomery. Missouri, at the age of 92. Her husband has been dead many years. —At the thirteenth hour; of Friday, April 13. Miss Eugena Russell, of New York, who has 13 letters in her name, reported that she had lost 13,000 francs in a taxi cab.