For Air Navigators.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 3, 20 January 1909, Page 4

For Air Navigators.

An enterprising Palis firm is busy with a bird's-eye map of France, on which, for the use of aeropianists and balloonists and air-navigators generally, the direct distances from town to town will be marked in clear figures. Now that the navigation of the air is a thing of the near future, people are realising how difficult it is for the captain of an airship to find out exactly where he is, and maps will not be sufficient for this purpose. Travelling at the rate of fifty miles an hour, which is a speed already made by airships of all kinds, it is quite impossible to recognise a landscape from above. The French Aero Club is offering prizes for the invention of ai, airship’s compass. The ordinary compass is no good at all. For some reason, as has already been proved on motor-boats, the action of the motr’s magnet influences the ordinary compass so that no reliance can be placed on it. In the motor-boat race from Algiers to Toulon the boats had to follow torpedo-boats. They would not find their way across without them. In the race from Boulogne to Folkestone, where all the competitors had ship’s compasses, most of them lost their way across the Channel, and one of them spent all day '•rushing round Calais and found himself off Cape Grisnez in the evening, while several went to Dover- by mistake instead of to Folkestone. So an airship compass will Ire a very necessary thing in the immediate future.