Flights & Flyers

Sidar the Reckless. Mexico City bands blared out all the patriotic welcomes they knew. Mexico's burly little President Emilio Fortes Gil beamed on his grandstand in Valbuena Field. Ambassador Dwight Whitney Morrow, at his left, smiled gravely. The populace screamed: "Viva . . . viva Sidar . . . viva Sidar el loco" [The crazy, reckless]. All this last week as Col. Pablo Sidar, 30, Mexico's "first" flyer since the death of Capt. Emilio Carranza (TIME, July 23, 1928), returned to Mexico City from a flight around South and Central America and Cuba. President Portes Gil pinned Mexico's first medal "For Aeronautic Merit, ist Class" on him. El Loco picked up his President and bussed him on both cheeks. Ambassador Morrow he saluted snappily.

Goebel Battered. Col. Arthur C. Goebel, who with Lieut. William Davis Jr. won the Dole Flight to Hawaii in 1927, was barrel-rolling over Los Angeles municipal airport last week to celebrate the return of 43 Los Angeles planes from a California tour. While he was upside down a dry cell from his battery broke loose and bashed him on the forehead. Dazed, he continued his inverted flight. When he righted himself and blood slopped into his eyes he landed quickly, was bandaged, then went up again.

T. A. T. Caution. Snow and darkness hid the path which a Transcontinental Air Transport with two pilots and six passengers was making east of Albuquerque, N. Mex. last week. The pilots, Vernon Lucas and F. N. Erickson, dropped flares, landed comfortably in six inches of snow and by radio kept telling Albuquerque that they were safe. Their caution exemplified the policy of T. A. T., whose transcontinental airmail service has been running surely and safely since its bad wreck two months ago.

Helicopteroid. Under each wing of his Hamilton monoplane, Jess Johnson of Delray, Fla. fixed a 19-ft. air screw to turn horizontally as a helicopter vane. Last week at the Hamilton factory in Milwaukee, Mr. Johnson's co-worker Victor Allison, of West Palm Beach, set the vanes twirling. After pushing the plane for 25 yds, they raised her to 100 ft. off the ground. Then Mr. Allison turned on the regular propeller at the plane's nose. The machine rose to 1,000 ft., continued flying, an apparently successful demonstration of such a helicopteroid.

Lost & Found. The old steamer Fort St. James which the late Roald Amundsen used in the Arctic, is a Hudson Bay Company post in Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island. To its frozen remoteness eight bearded, twitching men tottered. Their leader, Col. C. D. H. McAlpine, only after being warmed and fed, explained that they were the Canadian exploring party who were lost with their two seaplanes two months ago in a snowstorm over Queen Maud Sea. Out of fuel, they alighted on the water and dragged their planes to shore. They did not know that they were only 40 miles from the Fort St. James. Even had they known, they could not have crossed the water. After long delay the winter freeze arrived. Then came Eskimos who guided them over the jagged ice to hospitality. Colonel McAlpine had lost 40 lb.