Skies of Germany

Despatches of the past two years have taught U. S. newspaper readers to picture the sky over Germany as crossed and criss-crossed and streaming in all directions with aircraft, like a big duckmarsh at dawn. Last week a new detail entered the picture, a chain of airplanes hooked up like railroad express cars. As the flying train passes over a city, the rear plane is uncoupled. It circles noiselessly to earth. Passengers alight. Their train has vanished down the sky to leave other passengers at other cities. At some terminal city the "locomotive" will descend. ... In an experiment at Karlsruhe, a motorless glider, manned by a pilot, was successfully towed aloft and cut free and brought to earth. Engineers predicted the rest. Needing very little velocity to stay aloft, several gliders would be no great drag on a multi-motored ship, the chief problem lying in getting them off the ground at the start.

German science, invention and industry are teeming. Among developments lately reported have been things so varied as synthetic petroleum, and precious stones, motor fuel with water as a large ingredient, silk out of lobster shells and other garbage, bullet-proof police clothes. But aviation is the prime field in which Germany proposes to dominate the world tomorrow. Supremacy in the air will, she thinks, give her commercial supremacy. While "DIN," the Deutsche Industrie Normung, works on earth to standardize every manufactured product in Germany-- from collar buttons to apartment houses--and begs the industries of other nations to cooperate, so that a spare part for a, motor or typewriter made in Germany will be obtainable as readily in Brazil as in Belgium, the aeronautic engineers and companies, subsidized by the Reichstag,* pursue colossal designs.

Craft. The aerial sleeper is now a commonplace to government couriers between Germany and Russia. Eight leather easy chairs in the passenger cabin convert into four bunks, with curtains. There are slight, agile cabin attendants; refreshment machines.

A commission representing the French chambers of commerce which lately examined Germany's aircraft factories, found that ten-and twelve-passenger planes, triple-motored for safety, were still most in demand by the large German passenger companies. But larger planes were building daily.

The Junkers factory lately put into commission a triple-motored monoplane carrying 25 passengers and a crew of four.

A new Dornier Superwal model, with two Rolls-Royce-Conder motors, takes 21 passengers, crew of four. In tests it lifted 60 persons, a freight load greater than the ship's weight when empty.

Winged superboats driven by 12 engines and capable of carrying 100 or more passengers are under construction at the Junkers and Rumpler works. Japan has ordered one.

Study of a new type of construction--hollow metal body with curved side extensions replacing distinct wings--has led German engineers to predict ships of 150 tons, 20,000 tons!

Plans are drawn for a dirigible to fly around the globe without stopping.

Routes. The Lufthansa Co., largest of European flying corporations, was selling advance reservations last week for the opening flight of its Berlin-to-Peking via Moscow line.

Milan and Berlin were connected last week, with the opening of an extension of the new Berlin-Vienna service. (An Italian company will soon carry this line to Rome.)

Plans for a route connecting Germany and Spain are nearly complete, and upon them depends Germany's greatest plan of all, for access to South America. The cooperation of French and Swiss companies seemed necessary for a route touching Berlin, Stuttgart, Basel, Lyons, Marseilles, Barcelona and Madrid but a Spanish-German combination has finally undertaken to overleap the intervening countries and fly German planes all the way.

Germans have obtained a concession for a 5,500-mile Zeppelin service between Seville and Buenos Aires. The base at Seville is under construction. Taxiplane service will connect it with Madrid. The ship to be built at Friedrichshafen will first make an exhaustive study of high-altitude wind currents over the South Atlantic.

Figures. Ships of the Lufthansa Co. alone flew 3,813,858 miles last year, or 30% more than all French companies combined. They carried 56,268 passengers, almost triple the French total. (France stands second in European aviation, England third.)

The cost of German flying figured out at about 12-c- per mile in 1926. Flying fare is actually lower than railroad fare between Berlin and Munich (75 marks to 77%).

*To one company alone, the German State gave $4,000,000 last year. France's total air subsidy was about $2,500,000; Britain's, $685,000.