TRIP BY CLIPPER

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 62, Issue 4422, 7 May 1941, Page 7

TRIP BY CLIPPER

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE.

In peace-time Clipper travel was a luxury. War turned it into a necessity, this game of ping-pong playing four miles above the Atlantic waves by these 36-ton planes (writes Joe Paris in the London Daily Mail).

A single journey in one of them costs £'lo6 ss, or about Is 3d a min-

Let’s make the trip. Eight-thirty in the morning. You are at the La Guardia airport, New York City, ready to take off. In peace-time the Clipper can take 74 passengers. Now there’s room for only a dozen because mail demands more space.

If you’re lucky you’ll get the private “ sky suite ” at the back of the plane, which takes three people. Otherwise you live in a standard cabin that seats ten by day and sleeps six by night. The dining saloon turns into a games room when no one wants to eat.

After five hours’ flying you arrive at 2.30 in the afternoon (local time) at Darell’s Island, Bermuda.

At 4 o’clock you move on towards Horta in the Azores. At 6.30 next morning, probably before you’re awake, you arrive at the Azores, and leave usually an hour later. You’re in Lisbon at half-past four the same afternoon.

Apparently you’ve taken from 8.30 one morning until 4.30 the following afternoon —32 hours—to make the trip. But if you allow for the difference in times there are only 27 hours between the peace of the New World and warring Europe.