Chicago Show

Blue canvas for a ceiling stretched over Chicago's Coliseum last week. It was intended to represent the sky; few of the thousands who visited the first International Aeronautical Exposition under that dyed sky paid attention to it. Airport beacons flicked their beams about the room; few noticed them. People hurried around the Coliseum and two auxiliary show buildings to see and buy airplanes.

And buy they did--300 Command-Aires,/- 500 American Eagles, 500 Travel Airs, 200 Swallows. Fairchild and Curtiss made large contracts for plane deliveries. Scarcely was there a plane manufacturer who did not book immediate orders. Kreider-Reisner Challengers were popular,*as were Hamilton Metalplanes, Mohawk Pintos, Monarchs, Mono-coupes, Advance Wacos, and Consolidated Husky Juniors. Customers for the most part were young men. Air transport managers--for Transcontinental, National, Boeing, Western Air Express, Pan-American--examined the huge passenger planes --Fords, Fokkers, Loenings, Boeings, Keystones, Ryans, Stinson-Detroiters.

The British De Haviland Moth was the only foreign plane displayed. That lack of foreign makes vexed the large group of European aeronautic authorities who visited the show on their way to the International Aeronautics Conference at Washington, this week, and the 28th flying anniversary at Kitty Hawk, N. C.

Wright Aeronautical Corp. picked the show week to make a shrewd commercial gesture. Everybody knows the reputation of Wright Whirlwind and Cyclone motors, as they know the reputation of Pratt & Whitney Wasp and Hornet motors. But relatively few know the practical advantages of those motors. So Wright Aeronautical told the many unknowing ones in great advertisements that its $25-h. p. Cyclone is built for the great air lines and heavy-duty express planes, its 3OO-h. p. Whirlwind for multi-motored passenger carriers, its 225-h. p. Whirlwind for medium-sized passenger planes, its 150-h. p. Whirlwind for small runabout planes. Topping those advertisements, Wright's then announced that they would manufacture the loo-h. p. De Haviland Gypsy, a four-cylinder-in-line air-cooled engine (the other Wrights are radial air-cooled) for small gadabouts./- Usufructs of this astute advertising: people have bought twice as many planes as last year; next year they will buy twice as many as this; and they may naturally be expected to demand the motors they know most about.

/- Brilliant example of the air industry's swift enterprise. Young R. B. Snowden Jr. of Memphis, Tenn., reorganized Command-Aire, Inc., only last October to make biplanes at Little Rock, Ark., to sell at $3,250. Sales directed at business and college men have made Command-Aire a leader in the industry. *At $2,400 without motor. TIME, Dec. 3, erroneously printed the price as $24,000. /-The Gypsy is the third British motor to be made in this country The others: Cirrus, similar to the Gypsy; the Bristol Jupiter air-cooled radial.