Flights and Flyers

Flights & Flyers

Passage to India. Squadron Leader A. G. Jones-Williams and Flight Lieut. N. H. Jenkins of the British Royal Air Force taxied a huge Fairey-Napier monoplane weighing six and one-half tons and carrying 1,000 gallons of gasoline down a special two-mile runway at Cranwell Airdrome in Lincolnshire. They took the air and headed in a southeasterly direction. Twenty-seven hours later they were seen over Bagdad, still going. Forty-eight hours out they passed over Karachi in India with still 1,170 mi. to go to their destination, Bangalore. Two hours later the great plane reappeared over Karachi and landed. Head winds had eaten up its gasoline on the last half of the journey. Had the plane carried a radio, it could have been notified of a 30 m.p.h. tailwind which was blowing on a lower level. Distance: 4,130 mi.; time: 50 hrs., 38 min. (about 300 mi. short of the non-stop Rome-to-Brazil record flight; 15 hrs. short of the German endurance record).

Lady's Endurance. Elinor Smith, 17, entered a Bellanca monoplane at Roosevelt Field, L. I., took off, arranged the controls as best she could (her stabilizer went out of order) and settled down to read Tom Sawyer while soaring and soaring 600 ft. above the airport. She stayed there all afternoon, all night, all the next morning, part of the next afternoon. When she alighted she had established a new solo endurance flight record for women: 26 hrs., 21 min. 32 sec.--4 1/2 hrs. more than the previous record (Louise McPhetridge Thaden of California). Miss Smith told about being airsick: "I ate an orange but it wouldn't stay put. . . . Then I tried a tomato but it had a round trip ticket, too. I drank some water and it was the same story over again so I finally got tired and gave it up as a bad job."

Zeppelin Tour. Having taken its first spring jaunt to Jerusalem (TIME, April 8), the Graf Zeppelin took its second, last week, to the Madeira Islands. Rising from Friedrichshafen one afternoon with 20 paying passengers, Premier Otto Braun of Prussia, and 1,200 Ibs. of mail to be dropped on cities in passing, Dr. Hugo Eckener piloted his craft across France to Bordeaux, across Spain, Portugal and Tangier, out over the Atlantic to Madeira. He returned by the Mediterranean shore of Spain and the Rhone valley. The ship made its first night landing on the small Friedrichshafen field with perfect ease. Coverage: 3,400 mi. in 57 hours continuous flight. Next project: to the U. S., about May 15.

Asia and Back. All alone, Parker Cramer took off last week from Nome, Alaska, flew out over ice-filled Bering Strait, dropped packages at Cape Wales and on Diomede Island, reached East Cape in Siberia, returned to Nome: 400 mi. roundtrip. Next flight: from Nome to New York (not non-stop).

Up from Cape Town. Publisher Van Lear Black of the Baltimore Sun, gad-abouting over Africa and Europe, was forced down last month on the Italian Riviera. The strip of beach (near Bordighera) was too small for a takeoff. Last week he was still trying to load his ship on a barge to take it somewhere whence he can hop for England.