VOYAGING BY AIR.

Waikato Times, Volume 101, Issue 16873, 12 August 1926, Page 4

VOYAGING BY AIR.

The arrival of Captain Cobham in Sydney after an adventurous trip from London is recorded to-day. It was a great venture, and it stamps the Captain as a man of grit and determination. His is not the llrst llight, but it is the llrst made at this season of the year, when lie could anticipate adverse weather conditions and oilier drawbacks. lie lias surmounted them all and reached his goal. The world will acclaim him as a man who is ready to undertake something out of the ordinary. Aerial ilighls to-day are common compared with conditions which prevailed a few years ago, but they arc not so common as Lo demand only passing notice of a trip across lengthy _ expanses or sea and land. The” development of aeronautics is interesling. The llrst vehicles lo navigate the air were balloons, and gradually science evolved aerial navigation by aeroplanes and similar machines: The year in which Hying actually began 1.0 develop was 1908, for in that year the Bicriot monoplanes, (lie Antoinette monoplanes, and the Voisin biplanes /lew regularly in France. There was a great advance in tile following year, when Exhibition meetings took place alt N over Europe and America, and the' cross-country flights were made. Jn that year Henry Barman, on a biplane of Ids own construction, covered a distance of 118 miles in lliree hours and live minutes without alighting, this being Hie first occasion on which a hundred miles had been covered in the air, and on which an aeroplane had remained in the air for three hours. At that period Ihe maximum speed of aeroplanes was under fifty miles aii hour, and the greatest height known lo have been reached by an aeroplane was four hundred feet. The progress of aeronautics in the

following ten years, may be gathered from the fact that In 1919 British aeroplanes had attained a speed of over one hundred and sixty miles an hour. The development of. airships was no less remarkable. In 1917 a Zeppelin airship journeyed from Rumania to a point far to the south of Khartum and back, covering a distance of four thousand miles at an average speed of about forty miles an hour, remaining in the air for ninety-six hours. In 1919 a British airship flew from Edinburgh to New York without a stop in 108 hours, carrying a crew of thirty people. During the Great War Zeppelin airships navigated all over Europe, and mado trips from Northern Germany to the far west of England. In the year 1913 a London paper offered a prize of £IO,OOO for the first flight across tho Atlantic by a heavier-than-air machine within 72 hours. Suspended by the outbreak of the war the project was revived in 1919. A number of airmen proceeded to Newfoundland to await an opportunity of making the attempt. In the meantime three seaplanes of the U.S. Navy set out to fly the Atlantic, one, piloted by Licut.Commandcr Read, reaching the Azores in a non-stop flight. After a delay of some weeks he flew to Lisbon, thus achieving the first flight across the Atlantic, lie then flew to Plymouth. This aeroplane was not competing for the prize. Tho prize was won by Capt. John Alcock and Lieut. A. Whitten Brown on a Vickers Vimy aeroplane, starting from Newfoundland in the afternoon of June 14, 1919, and arriving at Clifden, Ireland, tho following morning in 15 hours 52 minutes. 11. C. llawker and Commander Grieve, on a Sopwith machine, were the first entrants for the prize to start having left St. John’s, Newfoundland, on May 18 in bad weather. When about half way across, the aeroplane was forced to come down through a defect in a pipe, and the two airmen were picked up by a Danish stoamei and landed in Scotland. They were awarded a consolation prize of £SOOO. Aerial voyaging has brought distances closer by the fact of being able to travel more direct routes, and in quick time. It is now being largely availed of all over the world for commercial purposes, and there are also aerial mail routes. In some outlying parts of Australia mails are being carried by air at the present time, and the inauguration of other services is now under contemplation. It is safe, in view of the developments during the past 20 years, to predict that ere a decade lias passed aerial commercial services will have revolutionised the world’s transport services.