JOBLESS AVIATORS

Waipawa Mail, Volume LXVI, Issue 142, 26 August 1938, Page 1

JOBLESS AVIATORS

FATE OF PIONEER FLIERS. LONDON, August 0. Experts who do something superlatively well can be sure of a good living in most walks of life. Not so the record-making aviator. Inquiries from some of the best-known flyers in Britain this week revealed that many of them are still looking for jobs despite world-wide fame. C. W. A. Scott, Amy Johnson, Tommy Rose, Jim Mollison, Beryl Markham, are all waiting for some good aviation job to turn up. Since 1936, when Scott won the air race to Johannesburg with Guthrie, he has been unable to obtain any regular employment. He is young, well educated, a pioneer in long-distance flying, in Australian air routes, recordholder for the Australian flight. Yet Britain does not want to use his experience. “All the work I can get,” he said, “is to deliver ’planes for manufacturers and act as a flying freelance. I am kept in flying trim by such odd jobs, but I simply can’t get regular employment. The same applies to practically all the other record-break-ers who did not give their lives in their pioneering work. “Amy Johnson, Tommy Rose, Jim Mollison and myself—in fact all of us left alive—are all in the same boat, job-hunting. We want to go on with our constructive work for British aviation, but we are blackballed, so it seems, by those who could make use of our skill and experience. ’ ’ Imperial Airways, to whom Scott applied for a job, replied:— “If you would be kind enough to write giving particulars of your career and personal details, we will have inquiries made and let you know whether it is possible to use your services in this country.” Other record-breakers told of similar heart-breaking efforts to get work; rivals in breaking records they are friends in misfortune now that they seem to have been thrown on one side. Scott told how his friends, Kingsford Smith and Bert Hinkler, had been desperate for jobs when they

undertook the attempts to set up new records which ended in their deaths. Amy Johnson is hopeful at last of getting “fixed up.” “Some of us don’t want the jobs that are offered us,” she said. “Others are getting jobs as instructors.”