AERIAL ENTERPRISE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23224, 23 June 1937, Page 8

AERIAL ENTERPRISE

For very obvious reasons spectacular flights by airmen have ceased to stir the imagination as they once did. Nevertheless, the exploit of three Russians in essaying a flight from Moscow to San Francisco by way of the North Pole is so far removed from the commonplace that it stands out among the more recent records of aerial achievement. According to an announcement which was published only when the aviators were well on their way, the object of their flight was to test the possibility of a Moscow-San Francisco air service with an intermediate stop at a special meteorological station at the pole. Presumably the test will be regarded as successful, since the airmen, while failing to reach their destination, landed safely within a few hundred miles of it. According to report, seventeen and a-half hours after leaving Moscow they flew over the pole and, if visibility served, they should have been able to look down upon the encampment of the Russian scientists, headed by Professor Otto Schmidt, who were lately deposited by aeroplane for the purpose of instituting scientific research in those frozen solitudes. The Soviet flag has been hoisted at the North Pole, and the scientists hope to establish a permanent meteorological station. The ice floe, they have stated, makes an admirable aerodrome. The flyers from Moscow to San Francisco are reported to have spent sixty-four hours in the air without sleep. Clearly the test

was one of endurance in their case, as well as of the practicability of the route. The congratulations of M. Stalin and President Roosevelt have been earned. It is early yet to hazard predictions concerning the practical value of this experimental flight, or the likelihood of the establishment of an air route across the pole. It seems that the modern air machine can go virtually anywhere. In New Zealand the establishment of an Auckland-Wellington air service will be an accomplished fact in a few days now that the test flights have been completed, and thus will be provided an air connection between Auckland and Dunedin which has been hitherto lacking. Perhaps this is but a prosaic record of advance in civil aviation, if it is compared with flights across the pole, but it is one.of considerable importance in relation to transport facilities in this Dominion.