A LEAP FOR LIFE

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1932, Page 8

A LEAP FOR LIFE

THRILLING ADVENTURE. airman in parachute. A parachute jump for life with hia clothing on fire when 1100 feet above the crowded streets of the East. End of London started a series of thrilling adventures for a young flying officer on November 12. The parachute carried, him nearly four miles almost into the Thames; his machine crashed in a West Ham garden. 1 , The young man was Flying-Officer Laurence Rayson Mouatt, the aeroplane a single-seater fighter belonging to the 56th Squadron, stationed at North Weald, Essex. Except for a slight burn on one hand, Mouatt escaped without injury; no one was hurt by the falling machine, but several people had narrow escapes. Mouatt was on a practice flight when he discovered, that his flying suit, electrically heated for winter flying, was smouldering. His attempts to beat out the fire failed and, faced with the alternative of crashing with his machine in flames, he decided to make a parachute descent—-the first in his experience. J While the plane hurtled into the garden of a house in Beckton Lane, near the West Ham Stadium, narrowly missing a group of houses, Mr. Mouatt was carried on a strong wind southward toward the Thames.

Swaying high above the housetops, the tiny figure which watchers had seen detach itself from the machine disapE eared from view. Police and ambuince men then began a search for the parachutist, whom they feared could not escape injury while landing in such a neighbourhood. Tall factory chimneys; huge pylons carrying high tension electricity cables; the docks —this was the dismal prospect for a parachutist landing in East London. With every minute camo fresh danger. But the astonished staff at the London County Council’s Northern Outfall Works near Beckton saw the amazing spectacle of a flying officer making a graceful descent to the ground near their pumping station. Disentangling himself from the folds of the parachute, the young man calmly walked to a shed, where the burns on the hand were bandaged. Then he teleE honed, to his aerodrome. An ambutnce was sent and Mr. Mouatt was shortly on his way back to the aerodrome. 1

"He missed dropping into Barking Creek by only a few feet,” said an official “Had he gone another 100 yards he would have ended up in the Thames.” When a reporter saw Mr. Mouatt at North Weald that evening he was quite unconcerned about his own adventure but relieved to hear that no one had been injured when his plane crashed. When the plane crashed it narrowly missed a house and fell only a few yards away from its occupant, Mrs. Davies, who was on her doorstep. “The wheels brushed, the tops of some tres just over my head,” said Mrs. Davies. “I ran to the wreckage, thinking that the pilot must be killed, and was very relieved but puzzled to find there was no one in it. No one near hera Bad seen the parachute descent.”