Better

Guns can hit airplanes. The Navy Department, last week, issued a re port on 42 practices against towed aerial targets, showed that 20 times the simulated bird-of-war had been caught by anti-aircraft fire. The targets, for physical reasons, were only one-tenth the size of a bombing plane and were flown at altitudes of 4,000 and 5,000 feet. Under these circumstances, the results were deemed highly satisfactory.

At the same time, the Department announced the development of a 5-inch anti-aircraft gun much superior to the present 3-inch.

These reports were calculated to offset the unfortunate failures of the Navy guns to hit air-targets off the California coast a month ago (TIME, Apr. 6).