AVIATION NEWS

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 72, Issue 6238, 5 June 1946, Page 11

AVIATION NEWS

SAFETY IN NUMBERS INSURANCE TESTIMONY Increased safety in flying is often cited in aviation statistics, but some of the most convincing evidence to date has been the trend of liberalisation in aviation underwriting by the life insurance comipanies. With the advent of peace this trend, interrupted by the war, has been resumed, and to-day both passengers and crew members can obtain life insurance protection on the most liberal basis of any time in the history of aviation. To the flying enthusiast, to the man or woman who may fly abroad in the post-war era, and to many others in this wingsprouting world, this is a significant development. It means that more and more air-minded persons are receiving more and more protection, year after year, as the life insurance business keeps pace with the advancement of safety in air travel, liberalising policies, and underwriting practices as rapidly as facts become available which justify such liberalisations. An indication of this was given in a recent announcement that worldwide airline passenger travel without limitation is now regarded as a standard risk in the issuance of life insurance policies to air travellers by about one half of the one hundred life insurance companies included in a survey of post-war practices in America. More than 80 per cent of the total insurance in force in that country is represented by the companies covered in this study. In addition, a considerable amount of world air travel, usually about 50,000 miles annually, is now regarded as a standard risk by another ten per cent of the companies surveyed, making nearly 60 per cent who place no underwriting limitations on normal world-wide travel. Only one-tenth of the companies now decline to issue policies to applicants who contemplate such travel, or issue policies excluding this risk, the remainder giving individual consideration to each case.

When it is recalled that before the war no companies regarded unlimited trans-oceanic travel as a totally standard risk, the reflection of flying safety in life insurance liberalisation is even more striking. This trend had proceeded with little interruption up to the start of the war. with the companies granting protection more and more freely as air safety increased. !

N°t a rriosouito was seen or felt by nearlv 10,000 persons who attended the first outdoor concert of the Newhaven Symphony Orchestra at the Yale Bowl after a Coast Guard helicopter sprayed the Bowl and adjoining acres recently with DDT, the war-developed insecticide. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station and the USDA Bureau of Entomologv and Plant .Quarantine co-op-erated in the project. A dog’s life is seldom a bad one when the canine is an international champion with more first-rank awards than plainer dogs have fleas. But even to the painstaking care given to most pure-bred show dogs the Air Age has added substantially. Instead of riding endless hours in the cramped quarters of an automobile’s dog trunk or railroad express car to reach shows, the Afghans owned by Marion Foster Florsheim, of Darien, Connecticut, fly swiftly and luxuriously to their destinations in a sleek Fairchild F-24.

.Tet-nronelled aircraft with speeds of 2500 miles an hour within the next five years are predicted by the Chief of the Aeronautical Research Engineer Cornoration, U.S.A., Mr Ward Beman. He said that a plane living at 2500 miles an hour would pick up 1120 degrees of heat through friction with the air. and would require an asbestos-lined heat resistant steel skin for the entire aircraft in place of the aluminium alloys used at present.

Uratol. a. new super-efficient aviation spirit, developed by the. Ural Division of the Russian Academv of Sciences, is twice as effective as high octane fuel. The raw material is turnentine. Because of resins and acids, larger carburettor jets a.re needed, but the Russians hope to overcome these snags by new cracking processes.