Mishap

Event. Where the Susquehanna River, coiling under the roots of an enormous elm tree, lips the edge of a lonely oatfield in Pennsylvania, two campers lay last week. The night was thick; a fog, which had crept like a huge grey beast out of the riverbed, sniffed at their fire; they waited for sleep.

At about 11, something woke in the obscure night over their heads; at first no more than a drowsy, indistinguishable murmur, then a louder whine, like the nasal complaining of some fabulous insect; presently its eye became visible--a small inflamed pimple, swathed in huge bandages of mist. The more alert of the two campers nudged his companion.

"The Night Air Mail," he said.

"Sounds like a big mosquito," grumbled the other. Realizing that their bivouac was near the route of the New York-Chicago Night Air Mail, she sat up to look, but even as she stared into the vague heavens, the buzzing stopped, the eye winked and began to circle lower and lower until it came to rest at the other end of the field.

What mummery was this? Night Air Mail planes do not land on lonely Pennsylvania oat-fields at midnight without cause. Yet it could not be an accident. Night Air Mail planes do not have accidents. Uneasily, the campers gaped at their ghostly visitor.

There was a sudden sputtering on the ground near the plane; combusting chemicals burst into a furious glare illuminating that desolate place with the radiance of an unearthly daylight, and revealing to the campers a scene unique, electrifying, sculptural.

Against the flare he had just set off stood the aviator immobile as a statue, while the landscape, leaping out of shadow at the summons of his fantastic torch, assumed around him an aspect of exaggerated horror; water-rotted trees at the river's edge stretched their arms in stiff attitudes of torment, like ghouls petrified in the death-agony; the motionless grain at his feet seemed to have been cemented, by the mist and the strange light, into an acre of solid stone. As he peered under his hand, trying in vain to see beyond the circle his flare had chiseled in the concave night, he looked like a man standing in a cave, beset by prodigious walls. . . .

The flare guttered, went out.

It was evident to the campers that the flyer had gained something to his purpose by this scrutiny; he started his engine, and the plane with a roar began to bump over the field toward the river. He opened the throttle; the plane caromed faster, tilting awkwardly up and down as if it were lamed.

"It's the grain," cried the astute camper, excitedly. "The grain has tangled in his wheels--he can't get up."

"He doesn't know his oats," replied the humorist-camper.

Almost at the river's maw, the baffled plane was flapping too fast to stop; this must be the end--inevitably it would finish its deranged perambulation against a tree trunk. Both campers sprang to their feet, but at that instant the plane rose drunkenly from the oat field. It tippled a moment, then clove desperately upward, straight for the crow's nest of the big elm. Could it win clear? Impossible! Three yards, five yards more. The impossible had happened. It had cleared, it was over. . . . But no. A strut had caught on a branch; with a snap of wood like a breaking bone the plane twirled sidewise, spilling 14 mail sacks from its entrails, sprawled down through the branches like a shot bird. A thud as the wings crumpled; a splash as its nose plumbed the shallow water. Then, out of the disordered darkness, came, incredibly, the thread of a cry.

"Help!"

The campers stared at each other, too appalled to answer. Again the thinned, desperate petition. Galvanized at last they rushed to the bank, splashed out to the wrecked plane. There they found Harry A. Chandler, Night Air Mail Pilot of New Brunswick, jammed into his cockpit by the crumpled wings, with the river, already at his chin, reaching up sluggishly for his mouth. He had lost his course in the fog, descended to the field for observation, and--as the shrewd camper had surmised--been kept from rising by the tough oat stalks which grappled the wire spokes of his wheels.

Half an hour later, when Pilot Chandler, apparently uninjured, was stammering furiously at local post office authorities in an effort to make them understand what to do with the mail bags, he suddenly fainted. Examination revealed a fractured skull, a broken collarbone.

His accident was an advertisement, not of the precariousness of the night air mail service, but of its extraordinary efficiency. A week before Chandler's accident, a report of the Air Mail's performance was issued:

During the first month of service between Manhattan and Chicago, 13,500 pounds of mail were carried without delay; postage receipts amounted to over $138,000. On the night the service began, Pilot Richard Amos was forced down by engine trouble 18 miles from the Cleveland flying field. Neither he nor his plane was damaged. Since he had been flying ahead of schedule, the mail reached Cleveland on time. There was not a single delay or serious smash.

This record was made by men who undertook, every damp summer night, hazards as great as Pilot Chandler's.

Now there has been one mishap.

Commercial Flying

To rent--a dirigible balloon as big as an ocean liner, painted with dull silver like frozen moonlight, tapering and pliable as one of the varicolored fishes that slide in the green seas: this is the epitome of rentals. The thought appealed strongly to John Hays Hammond Jr.

He, smart son of a smart father, has already dallied with inventions, but he had never rented a dirigible. Discerning other possibilities beyond mere aesthetic pleasure in such a transaction, he offered* last week, in partnership with two other men,/- to rent from the U. S. Government the huge blimp Los Angeles. President Coolidge, resting from cares of State at Swampscott, Mass., discussed the offer with Secretary Hoover.

Possibilities of profit in commercial traffic with lighter-than-air craft are, apparently, vast. As everyone knows, heavier-than-air machines are already hauling freight, carrying mails. Recently a huge Sikorsky plane flew from Mew York to Washington with two baby grand pianos aboard (TIME, May 4). The offer of Mr. Hammond and his associates may be the first move of an elaborate attempt, backed by large financial interests, to exploit an untried medium of commercial transportation.

General details of Mr. Hammond's plan are: 1) A daily dirigible service between New York and Chicago. The distance would be covered in twelve hours, at a proposed rate of $75 for the trip. 2) If this experiment proves successful, the system will be extended to include Boston, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Omaha, St. Louis. A second route would take in the Southern cities and Havana.

The promoters asked Owen D. Young, famed head of the General Electric Company, to direct a $50,000,000 corporation. "If our plan is carried out," said Mr. Hammond, "we will build ships for use in this country as comfortable as transatlantic liners, with promenade decks, large cabins, dining saloons, libraries."

Interesting facts about commercial aviation were presented in a recent article in The Outlook by one Laurence La Tourette Driggs:

P: If an aviator, flying over private property, annoys or causes financial loss to the owner of that property, he can be sued. Recently a plane frightened the frisky horses of a Vermont farmer. Plunging backward as they reared, they tore their flesh against the sharp steel of a plough. The farmer recovered damages.

P: In many states, there can be no promiscuous sprinkling of refuse from planes, no committing of malicious mischiefs by pilots or passengers.

P: Many state legislatures have adopted laws governing the passage of craft through their sovereign air. In one Southern state a plane must descend, obtain a license, pay a juicy fee, before it can fly on. European borders, on the other hand, offer no barrier; each one in each of the four power gondolas. Thus for the first time will the Shenandoah be armed. (The Los Angeles, built in Germany, must, by the terms of the transfer agreement, never be used as a war vessel.)

Endurance Record

Between Chartres and Etampes, France, is a course 62 miles long. Last week at Etampes two French airmen, Drouhin and Landry, climbed into the wind in a Farman biplane, heavily loaded with gas and oil, began to drive back and forth over the length of that road. Kerchiefed peasants in the bright fields heard them buzzing in the sky all day, all night and through the next day without a single lapse.

After Drouhin and Landry had been in the air 43 hr., 32 min., 47 sec., they had commuted 44 times from Chartres to Etampes, covered a distance of 2,732 miles. Then they stayed in the air over the airdrome nearly another two hours, making it in all 45 hr., 11 min., 59 sec.--a new world's non-stop flight record.

People who remembered the old non-stop record--the 2,520-mile flight from Mineola, L. I., to San Diego, made by Lieutenants Kelly and Macready in 1923 --curled their lips. To that hazardous leap the ta,me to-and-froing of the Frenchman seemed like a little boys' game. Not so is the purpose for which this game was undertaken--a training test for a direct flight from Paris to New York. Landry, Drouhin, will attempt it.

Ford's Buy

Henry Ford's interest in aeronautics became less academic and more commercial last week when he bought out all the stockholders of the Stout Metal Airplane Co.

The Stout Company makes the all-metal (duraluminum) monoplanes which the Fords have been trying out experimentally as commercial freight carriers for their own business. The Stout plant was reported to have changed hands for about $1,000,000. William B. Stout, founder of the Company, will remain as engineer of the "Stout Airplane Division of the Ford Motor Co."

The Fords having taken hold--the Fords, for Edsel has in large measure led the way into aeronautics--began laying plans at once for large-scale production. A plane a week (and soon a plane a day) was reported to be their program. Something of the kind is evidently in contemplation from the senior Ford's remark:

"The Ford Motor Co. plans to connect the various large cities in the United States by airways and maintain a regular schedule of deliveries. These cities will include New York, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Indianapolis and others."

They are seeking a new engine, better than the Liberty motors which they are using. They are seeking above all the reliability of mechanism which is necessary for commercial use.

*Eight months ago the Administration, in an effort to encourage lighter-than-air commercial service, announced that it would consider proposals to lease the Los Angeles.

/- Herbert Satterlee and Gen. Clarence R. Edwards.