ATLANTIC AIR SERVICE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20331, 14 June 1934, Page 1

ATLANTIC AIR SERVICE.

U.S. Syndicate’s Plans for Fast Mail Delivery.

NEW YORK, June 18. Letters posted in London will be delivered in New York fifteen hours later, according to the schedule for a trans-Atlantic air mail service, which will be inaugurated within six months. Colonel George R. Hutchinson, an American pilot, who is the head of an organisation backed by a New York syndicate, made this announcement to-day. The planes will follow the northern route, surveyed by Colonel" Lindbergh last year. A fleet of single-engined low-wing Vultee monoplanes, the world’s fastest transport machine, will be used. The Vultee has a cruising speed of 210 miles an hour, and a range of 3000 miles. A pilot and a combined radio operator, navigator and relief pilot will be carried. There will be space for four passengers, and 26501 b of mail and express cargo. Colonel Hutchinson is confident of success, and expects to extend the line to Moscow. He also expects to pilot a Vultee, already well proven in American air services, in the Melbourne Centenary race. Pan-American Airways have entered the United States West Coast transport field by inaugurating a Mexico City to Los Angeles service. The next branch in their spread across the Pacific will be a service by way of Vancouver and the Aleutian Islands to Japan and China. A later .service, using Glenn Martin Sikorsky super-clipper flying-boats, will' be from Los Angeles to Honolulu, a mail and passenger service, to be started within a year. The time of 4} days by fast steamer will be reduced to 15 hours. The super-clippers will charge 300 dollars (about £6O) a passenger. Apparently in the London-New York delivery time allowance has been made for the five hours’ difference in time between the two cities. A plane could take twenty hours on the flight, vet reach New York only fifteen hours iater by the clock