HINKLER’S FLIGHT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 12, 15 January 1932, Page 5

HINKLER’S FLIGHT

FEAT OF NAVIGATION SHEET FROM AN ATLAS. LONDON, Dec. 10. Squadron-Leader Hinkler’s plain story of his marvellous 10,000 mile flight from New York to London by way of the South Atlantic Ocean, told a few hours after his triumphal landing in his “Puss Moth” monoplane at Hanworth, aerodrome, only heightens the impression of matchless skill and daring which earlier information had made. Ho spoke, in terse, unemotional sentences, of flying “blind” for six hours over the Atlantic with only the luminous dials of his compass and turn indicator to help him, of hours spent five feet above the ocean, of tremendous thunderstorms—“the lightning flashes looked as thick as tree trunks” —and terrific squalls. His extraordinary powers of navigation, helped by a'sort of sixth sense developed in a vast experience of longdistance flying,, brought him to the coast of the African continent only ten miles from the landfall he had selected before leaving Port Natal, in Brazil. He flew entirely by compass and dead reckoning, the varying shapes and movements of the clouds enabling him in some uncanny way to estimate the extent of drift caused by changes of wind direction. His map was a sheet torn from an atlas, and the only instruments he used apart from the compass and the turn indicator, which kept, him flying level when all was blackness around him, were clock, air speed indicator, and altimeter. Hinkler stated that his maximum range with the tanks full was 25 hours at cruising speed. When he landed at Bathurst in the Gambia, about two hours’ fuel remained in tho tanks. Not Foolhardy Attempt. Though he depended so utterly on the perfect running of his 120 h.p. “Gipsy” motor, Hinkler’s flight escapes the charge of foolhardiness because of the minute forward preparations, involving the most exact knowledge of fuel and oil consumption and the perfect conditioning of every detail of machine and engine, and also because of his exceptional qualities. Aircraft designer and builder, inventor, brilliant tost pilot and navigator, Hinkler has the rare, perhaps instinctive, ability described in the phrase “he has a compass in his head.” When every possible allowance is made for knowledge and the precision of the elementary instruments he employed for tho 2000 miles dash across the open sea, there remains an inexplicable something which raises Hinkler and a few other pilots right above their fellows. To call it genius gives it a name, but does not dispel the mystery. Now Hinkler is faced with a long series of dinners, congratulatory meetings, decorations, and so forth. None has ever deserved them more than the gallant little Queenslander who, in making the first light aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic, the first west to east aeroplane flight over the South Atlantic, and the first solo trans-at-lantic flight since Lindbergh’s journey in a much bigger and more, powerful machine, has credited the British aircraft and aero engine industry and British pilotage with one of the greatest achievements in the history of aviation. Almost Skimming Waves. The first stage of a trip from New York to Jamaica was a test for what Mr. Hinkler always calls his “ship.” He left in the afternoon and arrived in Jamaica for breakfast next morning. Thence he went by stages round the coast of South Africa to Natal, in the north of Brazil, where he was much struck by the plumage of the birds he disturbed. “When I arrived there on 24th November,” he says, “I had only one day left before the end of the full moon to continue my journey. So I started across the Atlantic next morning. For the first 700 miles we were never more than sft above the surface of the ocean, because the south-easterly trade winds were blowing strong, and it did not seem wise to rise.” In Midst of Lightning. Nearly midway between America and Africa, the airman took an upward slant, to look for the moon by which to set his course. And then the most terrifying of all things in Nature to a man in his position happened. The sky was covered with black clouds, and out of them rolled the most appalling thunderstorm. “Chain lightning,” says Mr. Hinkler, “was everywhere. I have never seen anything like it. I had to fly right through the storm, and evry minute for an hour or more I expected that the next flash would go right through the ship. Scared, Oh yes, I was scared right enough. I never thought then that I should live to grow a long white beard. But I had to go on, you see. There was nothing else to do. ” After that, it seems, everything was plain sailing. “I got to Africa by breakfast time all right. I had aimed when I started at a place on the coast ten miles from Bathurst, and I passed the coast first at a point only ten miles from my objective. I recognised it from the shape. I had never flown oyer that coast before, but I had studied it all on tho map and knew what to look for. I found my course by compass and dead reckoning alone.”