Pouch

The crash most dreaded by airmail men is the one that ends in fire. Unless the pilot can extricate the bags from the flames, the mail is surely lost, there being no perfected means of dumping the bags in flight in an emergency.* Post Office officials eyed with interest an experiment begun last week by National Air Transport and Railway Express Agency, with a fireproof and heat-proof cargo pouch developed by Johns-Manville Corp. This new bag was said to withstand a fire hot enough to melt sheet-metal and fuse pipes, without allowing even the sealing wax on letters inside to soften.

N. A. T. will use the pouch for valuable express shipments. One drawback to adoption of the bag by the Post Office is its weight--20 Ib. as compared to the present 6-lb. type.

Navy Year

Proud and happy was the Navy to announce last week that during the fiscal year 1930 its planes & pilots flew 260,000 hr., an increase of 57,000 hr. over the year before. Flying hours per fatality were 14,500, compared to 6,773 hr in 1929. Miles flown per fatality in 1930 were 1,015,000.

One of the Navy's first accidents in fiscal 1931 occurred last week at Philadelphia--a freak crackup. Three flyers took off in a Martin bomber for parachute tests, with 200-lb. dummies secured in the bomb rack beneath the fuselage. About 100 ft. aloft, the parachute of one of the dummies worked loose, streamed aloft, was jerked full open by the wind. Down snapped the nose of the plane as if an anchor had suddenly been dropped. The short dive wrecked the ship, set it afire, seriously injured Lieut. Commander Oscar W. Erickson and his two assistants.

Crashes of the Week

While scheduled U. S. civil aircraft flew 720,000 mi. last week without serious mishap, three flights on the stunters' fringe of commercial aviation ended disastrously.

Goodwill Tour. In the course of a tour of 100 smalltown Exchange Clubs, to demonstrate the dependability of aviation for passenger travel, Frank Goldsborough, 19, son of the late Brice Goldsborough,* took off from Cleveland for Keene, N. H. In the Green Mountains, he plowed into a peasoup fog. Unable to climb over it, he dove his Fleet biplane to 2,000 ft., crashed into the treetops near Bennington, Vt. Painfully injured. Goldsborough's companion, Donald Mockler, publicity-man for Richfield Oil Corp. tried to lift the wreckage that pinned Goldsborough, then stumbled through forest and swamp for five hours to summon help. Twelve hours later searchers located the plane, extricated Goldsborough. They carried him eight miles to Bennington where he died next day--his 20th birthday.

Barnstormer. Roy ("Jack Dare") Ahearn, famed barnstormer, parachute jumper and stuntflyer, head of the Red Wing Flying Circus, took a French Albert parasol monoplane aloft over Teterboro, N. J. At 4,000 ft. he dove the tiny craft in an attempted outside loop. The plane's 40-h. p. motor would not pull out of it. Four times Pilot Ahearn climbed slowly back to make another try. On the final attempt he threw the throttle open, held the plane's nose down longer than before. The wing tore loose, fluttered away. Un- checked, the fuselage bored down into the earth, instantly killed Stunt Pilot Ahearn.

Toothpaste. Since early this year, Kolynos Co. of New Haven, Conn, (which annually hands out thousands of little yellow tubes of toothpaste at Yale football games) fondled the idea of stimulating its South American trade with a publicity flight. The Stinson monoplane K, it was planned, would fly nonstop 9,000 mi. to Buenos Aires, refueling in the air en route. After weeks of persistent misadventure, the K took off from New Haven two months ago, landed the same day at Roosevelt Field, N. Y. where the crew of three angrily disbanded. Last week Pilots Garland Peed, Randy Enslow and Jimmy Garrigan took the K off from Roosevelt, refuelled over the field, headed for Havana. Soon they encountered sticky fog, lost their bearings, groped for eight blind hours until the K's fuel supply ran out. Then, without the vaguest idea where they were, they took to their parachutes, alighted near the wreck of the K,15 mi. from Monroe, Ga.

*In the past year, 4,665 Ib. of air mail were destroyed by fire, while 7,715,587 Ib. were safely transported.

*Goldsborough, expert of Pioneer Instrument Co., was navigator aboard Mrs. Frances Grayson's amphibian Dawn which was lost between Roosevelt Field and Harbor Grace, N. F. in December 1927. The plane was to have attempted a flight to Denmark. Frank Goldsborough qualified for his pilot's license last November, established a junior record for transcontinental flight two months ago (TIME, May 12).

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