The Wanganui Chronicle "Nulla Dies Sine Linea" SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1923. AIR PROPHECIES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18757, 14 April 1923, Page 4

The Wanganui Chronicle "Nulla Dies Sine Linea" SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1923. AIR PROPHECIES

At the Air Conference in London last month Sir Wm. Joynson-Hicks visualised as a certainty in the next war ‘‘large fleets of aeroplanes carrying high explosive bombs far more terrible than any we had in the last war, travelling without pilots during the night, perfectly silent both as to their propellors and their engines, directed electrically and carrying death to any town on which they might descend." There is nothing more improbable in this prediction than in the prophecies o£ a magical era of civil aviation, in which New York would be brought within 12 hours of London, and airships would travel regularly and profitably between England and India, carrying hundreds of passengers and many tons of mails. But is it. then, to be assumed that a world in which air-travel will be as much commercial commonplace as travel by ship, railway and motor-car must also be a world shadowed perpetually by the threat of such horrors as Sir William Joynson-Hicks brightly contemplates? It is for civilisation to provide the answer. The possible period is obvious, but there are those who argue that the infernal possibilities of aircraft as weapons of war provide an impressive argument, not against the use of aircraft, but agaflnst war. This argument is supported by the simple analogy that nations do not scrap their merchant and passenger ships because the firms that build these can also build battle cruisers. If it is true that the fear of new methods of frightfulness is not of itself sufficient to prevent new wars, it is time also that it has at least begun to exert a salutary influence in making peace worth while. And it is, we believe, a logical assumption that the fact that the baser uses to which a great modern industry may be put cannot check its ultimate employment in the full service of man. Although as yet the average New Zealander has had. little or no experience of flying, it is common knowledge that in the older countries the instinctive dread of leaving the solid ground is rapidly losing its reality and its force. Last year on the regular British air routes over 32,000 passengers were carried, and machines flew from end to end ot Europe without a single accident to pilot or passenger. Continuous experimental research work Is steadily modifying the risks and increasing the comfort of travel by air. Nightflying—even flying in fog—will soon I be a common and a reasonably safe experience for the business man in a hurry. There seems hardly room for doubt that when the world has settled, down to the practices of peace, and capital is again available for new enterprises demanding courage and imagination, the aircraft industry will come into its own as one of the most valuable resources of modern communities. In the meantime, until civilisation has come fully to its senses concerning the wickedness of war, no nation can afford to disregard the sinister prophecy of Sir Wm. Joynson-Hicks or to forget that in a world in which things are as they are to-day self preservation must still be appraised as the first law of nature.