Flights & Flyers

Pilots & Priests. On its delivery flight from Detroit to Lakehurst last week the metalclad dirigible ZMC-2 (TIME, Sept. 2) scared a team of horses at Kingston, N. J. The runaways threw their driver, one Calvin Petty, from his seat and dragged him. Dirigible Capt. William E. Kepner and his crew of two saw the accident, lowered their ship over St. Joseph's

College for Roman Catholic priests, shouted down the news. Student priests ran to rescue Calvin Petty. Bleriot Cup. Louis Bleriot, early flyer, now head of Bleriot-Aeronautique at Suresnes, France, believes that land planes can attain 750 m.p.h. To excite experiment he offered a Bleriot Cup for fastest land planes, to correspond with the Schneider Maritime Cup. Difficulty of landing planes built for high speeds has retarded land plane design. M. Bleriot suggests that very fast planes keep speeding until they lose their momentum in air, then float to earth by huge parachutes. Treed. Over the Long Island outskirts of New York City, one Warren Engel, student flyer of the German-American Aero Club, ran out of gas. The best landing in his judgment was the cushiony top of a Mrs. Mary Johnson's 300-year-old oak tree. He alighted. Killed: two Johnson hens, by fright. Injured: Mrs. Johnson's wash, by oil leaking from the treed ship; Student Engel's feelings, by words sprayed at him by irate Mrs. Johnson.

Black Airmail. At Duisburg, Germany, one Hermann Pattberg, rich manufacturer, received a package containing a carrier pigeon and a note ordering him to tie a 5,000-mark ($1,191) bank note to the pigeon and release it. Otherwise he would be killed. Shrewd Herr Pattberg hired a plane and pilot which followed the pigeon and photographed the house on which it alighted. Duisburg police soon arrested the blackmailer. Less smart were Manhattan police last April when a Dr. Louis Alofsin received a pair of pigeons and a demand for $10,000. Police, futile with field glasses on housetops, watched the birds fly across the Hudson to New Jersey.

Tandem-Wing Monoplane. While Giuseppe H. Bellanca, Italian, was designing a monoplane with elevators so large that they virtually formed a second rear wing, George Fernic, tousle-haired Rumanian, was building a monoplane with a second true wing set at its nose. His theory was that the auxiliary wing would prevent stalling. Last week at Roosevelt Field, L. I., Designer Fernic flew his machine successfully, although he could gain only 700 feet altitude. On a second trial he ran it into a wire fence, partially wrecked it.

Rohrbach-Romar Wreck. Furious was Dr. Adolf K. Rohrbach, head of the Rohrbach Metall-Flugzeugbau, who was in Manhattan last week. One of the three huge trimotored Rohrbach-Romar seaplanes his company has built for Luft Hansa's trans-Atlantic service crashed at Travemuende, Germany, floated for 90 minutes, then sank. Thirteen passengers and crew were saved. The crash was due to test flying at low speed. The sinking was because hull portholes and bulkhead doors had not been closed as Dr. Rohrbach had ordered.