CHINESE AVIATORS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23499, 13 May 1938, Page 10

CHINESE AVIATORS

TRAINING SCHOOL HUNDREDS INSTRUCTED China’s main aviation training centre at Kunming is now situated in this capital of the country’s south-western Yunnan Province, to which most of the staff and equipment of the main brandies of the Central Aviation Schools at Hangchow and Nanchao have been removed.

Using scores of American and Russian training planes under all Chinese instructors, more than 400 young men are receiving training in modern aerial warfare. Though training conditions are reminiscent of the mass instruction of World War days the cadets receive a full course in both theoretical and practical flying. Planes take off and land in an unending stream daily, from dawn to dark, at the aerodrome on the outskirts of Kunming. The repair shops are kept busy by the frequent crack-ups, often due to the fact that Kunming is 6000 ft above sea level, and the thin atmosphere makes taking off and landing difficult.

This air school will certainly be the first target if and when Japanese planes bomb Kunming, but it is believed that the possibility nf success for such a venture is remote. Although Kunming is only a little more than 400 miles in a straight line from the coast, the nearest coastal points being Pakhoi, invading planes must circle eastward around the French Indo-China border, navigate through a peculiar curtain of constant rainstorms along the south-eastern Yunnan border, and fly over 10,000 ft ranges in order to reach Kunming.

Commercial pilots think that Kunming is one of the most difficult places to locate from the air, and cite the numerous occasions on which they would have been lost but for the radio beacon, though they fly over the Hanoi-Kunming route several times weekly. It is reported, however, that provisions have been made against an attempt by invading planes to locate Kunming by following the commercial beam. The air school has made good. Its first class of 130 was graduated last month, and these cadets are going to Lanchow and to a point somewhere in Chinese Turkestan for special advanced work, reportedly under Russian tutelage. Kunming headquarters is expected to be the permanent site of the Central Aviation School, though at present it is not completely equipped and much of the office furniture is made from empty gasoline cases. A hospital is being built. The air school workshop is being used for the assembling of some new French pursuit planes under the supervision of French mechanics. A total of 42 of these low-wing monoplanes is expected to be assembled in the near future. A report from a reliable source indicates that other French planes of the bombing type are being assembled in Haiphong and will be flown to the border.