Foolproof?

The Curtiss Tanager, entrant in the Guggenheim Fund Safe Aircraft Competition, passed all its preliminary tests last week at Mitchel Field, L. I. It enters the finals with only one possible rival, a Handley-Page biplane similar in many respects to the Curtiss entry. Both planes have automatic wing slots. Frederick Handley Page has filed suit in Brooklyn for triple the amount of any prize the Tanager may win. He claims that the Curtiss plane is using wing slots on which he has a patent, without his warrant. The Curtiss company is expected to file counteraction claiming infringement of six basic patents by Handley Page in his ship. Both planes are biplanes, the Tanager a three-place enclosed ship with Curtiss Challenger 176 h.p. radial air-cooled motor. In addition to its slots, it has wing flaps, which vary the camber, or apparent thickness of the wing, and (the main feature) floating ailerons, which automatically assume a position parallel to air currents made by the plane in flight. The pilot can work the ailerons by hand as well, to effect lateral control of the plane, likewise the wing flaps. The plane has been designed to be put into immediate production with few changes in manufacturing methods now employed. Robert R. Osborn, project designer, speaking for the entire group of Curtiss engineers who jointly developed the Tanager in the Curtiss wind tunnel after two years' research, last week claimed that the floating aileron gives control at any angle of flight, adds non-stalling characteristics to the plane's performance, does not affect the life of the lower wing. The minimum performance requirements of the competition, included in the 18 preliminary tests which the Tanager successfully passed, are a high speed of 110 m.p.h., a minimum speed of 35 m.p.h., a rate of climb of 600 ft. per min. at sea level, a range of flight of 405 mi. at full throttle, an absolute ceiling (maximum altitude to which plane can travel) of 15,000 ft. By passing the preliminaries, the Tanager is entitled to a $10,000 prize. If it has no other competitor in the finals, it will take the first prize of $100,000 at the same time relinquishing the $10,000 prize.

Eielson Hunt

(See map )

A rough wall of wind frescoed with whorls of fog effectively blocked Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia, to flyers last week. Nor could boats cross under the wall, for clumps of ice, like polar lizards, skittered through from the Arctic Ocean southward. Yet it was becoming increasingly urgent that men get from the American to the Siberian side. Carl Ben Eielson was lost somewhere over there, with his mechanic Earl Borland. They had been missing since a flight Nov. 9. If living, their provisions, doled sparingly to each other, would have lasted two months.

Carl Ben Eielson, 32, is, perhaps was, general manager of Alaskan Airways. There are no regular air transport lines in the Peninsula. Alaskan Airways has bases at Nome, Anchorage, Fairbanks. It charters its planes for taxi and express service, using about 70 small government landing fields in summer and any patch of level snow in winter.

Last November the fur ship Nanuk, icebound off Cape North, Siberia, radioed for an Alaskan plane to portage about a million dollars worth of furs to Fairbanks for train shipment, and some people aboard to mainland comforts. With winter on the region, oversea flying was unusually risky. Eielson decided to pilot the plane himself rather than foist the job on a subordinate.

He knew Arctic flying better than any other man.* When the U. S. Army flyers made the first air penetration of Alaska (1920)/-, he was teaching at Fairbanks High School. Norwegian-blooded, born in North Dakota, school work irked him. He became a flyer.

When Sir George Hubert Wilkins began his three-year long attempt to fly across the Arctic to Europe, Eielson, most experienced pilot of the region, became his pilot. Fairbanks, their base, has since become the base of most Alaskan flying. Point Barrow was their jumping point. In 1927 they made a westerly exploratory tour to north of Wrangel Island. Three times their plane came down on drifting ice. Eielson froze his fingers fixing the motor. At the third alighting they abandoned the plane. For 17 days they walked, jumped and crawled over the floes to Beechey Point, east of Point Barrow. Eielson's endurance and ingenuity during that accident kept his friends from desperation in the present situation. Unless he and Borland were too injured to move they were daily expected to plod in to some station.

There are Eskimo and Tchuktchis Indian villages about every 15 miles along the north Siberian coast where Eielson and Borland presumably floundered. They may be squatting sheltered in a native's snow-drifted skin-&-driftwood house. If so, they did not see or were unable to signal a searching plane which flew from Teller, base of relief operations, to the Nanuk. The plane is still at the ship, held down by dismaying weather, scant fuel.

At Teller, a neat village of ten frame buildings, a group of flannel-shirted, khaki-trousered flyers in fur parkas and mukluks, stomped around in helpless patience last week. What planes they had, light open ones, could not ram through the foggy wind wall. But able help was en route. The Coast Guard cutter Chelan landed three Fairchild cabin planes and Canadian crews at Seward, whence they were shipped by rail to Fairbanks. There the Canadians assembled their planes and flew them towards Teller. They undoubtedly can jump the wall.

Last week also Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Eielson's close friend, asked Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, "the man I know best in the Cabinet," somehow to ask the Soviets to put their Siberian representatives on the hunt, particularly those at the Wrangel Island meteorological station and on the ships Lipke and Stavropol. It was a ticklish request, for the U. S. and Russia have no diplomatic relations. Secretary Wilbur immediately asked the Soviet Government for aid, through its Washington information bureau. He also sent telegrams to Territorial Governor George Alexander Parks at Juneau, urging him to ask help directly from Soviet stations and ships which might be able to give it. Governor Parks was at Denver, Col. Acting Governor Karl Theile relayed Secretary Wilbur's plea.

Senator William Edgar Borah, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a great Soviet protagonist, acted more directly. Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, onetime Assistant Attorney-General, now Washington attorney for The Aviation Corp. which owns Alaskan Airways, begged him to intercede. He cabled to Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs at Moscow. At once the Russians, eager to repeat their glory of rescuing the wrecked Italia crew, ordered out three planes stationed within flying distance of Eielson's disappearance. They also telegraphed and radioed Siberian outposts to send out sledge parties.*

Travel Booster

How can transport operators boost air travel at this season, when traffic is desperately light and expensive planes must keep schedules? Universal Aviation Corp. last week sought to kill the trouble by offering $250 mileage books from which Universal's air conductors will tear fares exactly equal to railroad fare plus Pullman charges between any two points served. Thus: Kansas City to Chicago regular air rate is $45.75; the railroad-pullman rate, and hence the Universal mileage scrip rate, $21.03. Anyone can buy and use the books --doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.

South American Race

The two competitive U. S. racers for South American air transportation are Pan-American Airways and New York, Rio and Buenos Aires Line. The latter, of which onetime Assistant Secretary of Commerce William Patterson MacCracken is now board chairman, last week had most of its planes and pilots at their stations alert to start their service between Manhattan and Buenos Aires.

Meantime, Pan-American was busy. It opened its air-rail from U. S. points, by way of Miami, to Latin-American countries. It cut its airmail rates from the U. S. to the South American west coast, and therefrom across the Andes to the Argentine. From cheaper rates, it expected more business. For goodwill, it arranged to carry a load of U. S. doctors to inspect northern South American districts when the Pan-American Medical Association meets in Panama City the end of this month. It ordered from Designer-Manufacturer Igor Sikorsky two of the largest amphibians yet made. These ships will have four motors, a total of 2,300 h. p., to carry 40 passengers and a useful load of six tons additional. Also, Pan-American sent a ship to survey the South American east coast, along which it will extend its competition with NYRBA.

Flights & Flyers

At the Moulmein Pagoda. A steady drone of power changed suddenly to a stutter of uncertainty, then stopped. Joseph Marie Le Brix and M. Rossi on a flight from Paris to Saigon, Cochin-China, last week, scrambled to undo safety belts, climbed over their cockpit's edge and stepped, parachutes unfolding, into the black darkness over the mountains near Moulmein, Burma. The old Moulmein pagoda heard the shriek of wind against wires as the Frenchmen's plane roared to the ground with no one in control. The plane was demolished, mail was lost, Rossi fractured his pelvic bone, the hopes of Le Brix to outdo ''Doudou" Costes, who preempted the kudos of their 1928 world flight and thereby created a personal enmity, were shattered.

Frigid Test. For 6,000 miles, 20 Army planes of the 1st Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, Mich., will wing a bleak way to Seattle and back again, this week and next, to test the winter endurance of personnel, of new high-powered planes. The planes use skis instead of wheels on landing gear.

Stumped. In heavy snowfall, darkling skies an airplane groped around for Stout Field, Indianapolis, last week. The pilot misjudged the size of the field and overshot it. A snowcovered stump at the end tore away the left wheel and part of the fuselage. Transcontinental Air Transport had to mark up one dead, two injured.

*Comparable to him in Arctic experience and flying skill, but not in navigation, are Bernt Balchen, Commander Byrd's chief pilot in Antarctica and Hjalmar Riiser-Larsen, both Norwegians. Last week Riiser-Larsen flew from the whaling ship Norvegia in Antarctic waters and took possession of newly discovered land for Norway across the polar continent from Byrd's quarters.

/-Later the Army world flyers flew along southern Alaska and the Aleutian Islands (westward, 1924), the Russian disguised bomber Land of the Soviets along the same route (eastward, 1929), Parker Dresser Cramer from New York to Nome (1929), Ross G. Hoyt from New York to Nome to British Columbia where he crashed.

*In 1928 Eielson and Wilkins made their astounding air way across the Arctic from Point Barrow eastward to Spitsbergen, across converging lines of longitude, through shifting fields of terrestrial magnetism--at 135 m.p.h. The late Roald Amundsen, with Lincoln Ellsworth and Umberto Nobile, beat them to the first Arctic air crossing by sailing the semirigid dirigible Norge from Spitsbergen westward across the North Pole to Nome, Alaska. Amundsen was killed two years ago trying to find hapless Umberto Nobile who had been wrecked with his Pole visiting semirigid Italia. Wilkins is now at Antarctica making occasional exploratory flights from Deception Island. Eielson was with him there last year, would have returned except that he had "to make some money." He said: "This exploring life is fascinating. But you can't live on glory when you get old." Managing Alaskan Airways was the opportunity he took.

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