Rotors & the Navy

If autogiro builders pride themselves on one thing, it is the security of the rotor assembly, the arrangement of windmill-like vanes which keeps an autogiro aloft. Every layman wants to know what would happen if the blades flew off. Always the answer is: "They don't fly off." Hence, if a 'giro had flown through the window of his Philadelphia office and knocked him from his chair, Vice President Geoffry S. Childs of Autogiro Co. of America could not have been more violently upset than he was by what he read in the Philadelphia Inquirer one day last week: a story stating that a Navy 'giro had cracked up at Quantico, Va. because a rotor blade had carried away.

Vice President Childs knew about the crackup. It occurred, he was positive, because the pilot, Staff Sergeant Gordon K. Heritage, USMC, had tried to take off before the rotor was turning at sufficient speed. The ship fell from about 30 ft., wrecking the undercarriage and breaking the rotor blades at the tips when it hit the ground. Otherwise all four blades remained intact.

Prepared to sue for libel, Mr. Childs investigated, learned to his further indignation that the story had been rewritten from an official press release of the Navy Department.

Then he marched to his president, Harold F. Pitcairn. Mr. Pitcairn telephoned Rear Admiral William A. Moffett, Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, protesting the calumny. Also, in the absence of Assistant Secretary for Aeronautics Ingalls, he appealed to Secretary of the Navy Adams. Result: the Navy Department retracted its statement, announced an investigation to decide whether the crash was the 'giro's fault or the pilot's.

Last week the first 'giro to be seen in Cuba was landed on General Machado Airport, Havana, by Capt. Lewis A. ("Lon") Yancey who flew it from Key West.

Cairo-to-Cape

Over a stone slab in the lonely Matopos Hills of Rhodesia a big Hercules biplane will fly this week. In its flight the plane will accomplish, in unforeseen manner, the dream of Cecil John Rhodes. It was his ambition to see a British railway "from the Cape to Cairo." The railway is not yet finished. But the 18-passenger ship which crosses Rhodes's rock-hewn grave is the first of a weekly service of Imperial Airways connecting not only Cape & Cairo, but both of them with London and India.

Even now, for a few weeks, only mail and express will be carried below Nairobi until the operators have enough flying experience on the new sector to warrant taking passengers.

From Cairo to Cape, flying time is eight days (no night flying). London to Cairo is three days. The saving in time on a through trip from London to Cape (eleven days by air; 17 days by steamer) may not be large enough to justify the difference in fare (-L-130 by air; -L-72 to -L-89 by steamer). But the airway shows to tremendous advantage over surface travel for journeys to the interior. Africa's woodburning railroads, where they exist, are generally slow. Travel by motor is costly, often impossible. It is the proud boast of Imperial Airways that the Government agent or missionary in Tanganyika can save 40 days of his home leave by flying. The plane which took off from Croydon last week, carrying Air Vice-Marshal Sir Vyell Vyvyan (a director of Imperial), Lady Vyvyan and Francis George Lawder Bertram, Deputy Director of Civil Aviation, as honorary deadheads on the first flight to the Cape, was the 38-passenger, 4-motor Heracles.* Before the passengers reach their destination they will have changed vehicles seven times. Taking off from Heliopolis Airdrome at Cairo in a 20-seater Argosy biplane on the fourth morning, the passenger begins a 5,750-mi. flight over every type of physical surface except ocean. He is to look down upon river, lake, jungle, snow-capped mountain, desert, steppe, tableland. The mosques of Cairo are still in view when the ship roars out over the desert, and the pyramids, nearly 70 of which can be counted from the plane on a clear day. The delta of the Nile has converged into a single muddy channel, marking the Argosy's course over Luxor to Assouan where the First Cataract gives notice that the great Assouan Dam lies ahead. At the company's rest house, black boys serve luncheon to passengers and crew before the flight continues to Wadi-Halfa which marks the crossing into the Sudan, the change from desert to sandy plain, and a night's rest for plane & passengers. About midday next day, after leaving Atbara, monotonous stretches of sand are broken by occasional glimpses of cotton fields. By nightfall they are at Khartoum, junction of White and Blue Niles. For the third and fourth days' jumps from Khartoum to Juba and on to Nairobi the passenger changes to a Short "Calcutta" flying boat. Here, if he is a stranger, he begins to see the Africa of his imagination. Vast swamps and lakes, abounding in hippopotamus and crocodile; jungle broken by an occasional clearing in which black-skinned natives are to be seen. Near Juba the plane is likely to scare up a herd of elephant. En route to Nairobi, paradise of the big-game hunter, is the home of the lion, the rhinoceros, the giraffe. At every stop, white settlers and natives alike flock to the air station to witness the magic weekly arrival. Out of Nairobi in a Hercules land plane (like the 38-passenger ship which left London, but equipped for only 18 passengers to make room for cargo and to lighten the load for high altitude flying) across grassy plains, home of the fierce Masai who hunt lion with spears, in easy view of Africa's tallest peak--snow-capped Kilimanjaro. Now, in rarefied atmosphere, the ship needs all the supercharged power of its three engines. There is an overnight stop in a company rest bungalow at Mbeya. Thence across Northern Rhodesia and the Zambezi River to Salisbury, important grain centre. Over rolling plains next day to Bulawayo, the goldfields of Bechuanaland, the great city of Johannesburg. Thence via famed Kimberley and down through the mists of Table Mountain to Cape Town. As everyone knows, a flight the length of Africa is not in itself new or spectacular. Neither is Imperial Airways' conservative schedule remarkably fast, as flying goes. Only two months ago Pilot A. Gordon Store, accompanied by Miss Peggy Salaman, made a record of five and a half days from London to the Cape. But the difficulties of blazing the trail were staggering. Below the Nile basin airdromes had to be cleared of grass and thorns ten feet high which, if neglected for three weeks, would completely obliterate the field again. In the rainy season natives were kept busy levelling off elephant tracks deep enough to upset a plane. In Tanganyika, landing fields were literally hewn out of the forest; one had to be cleared of 63 ant hills each 40 feet in diameter. In some places the ant hills grew two feet per week, elephant grass three inches in a single night during the rainy season. After the route was cleared a large part of the early commercial flying was done by Sir Alan John Cobham and the Blackburn Company, whose interests were taken over last year by Imperial Airways. Development of the African service is the magnum opus of G. E. Woods Humphery, managing director of Imperial. He went to Imperial in 1925 when it took over Daimler Airways (of which he was general manager)--a trans-Channel line which ten years ago gave service nearly as adequate as present-day facilities. R. A. F. trained, as are practically all transport flyers in England, Manager Humphrey does not use his title of "major."

Flights & Flyers

90-c- Diesel. With $1.80 worth of furnace oil for fuel, Clarence Duncan Chamberlin climbed in a Diesel-powered Lockheed to about 20,000 ft. over New York, landed again on Floyd Bennett Field with 90-c- worth left.

Flagpole. In the dusk over Lake Michigan famed Edward Anderson ("Eddie") Stinson heard the engine of his new Stinson Junior de Luxe monoplane, which he was testing, gasp for fuel. Dean of U. S. flyers, chief civilian instructor of World War pilots, who had spent 20 of his 46 years in aviation, Pilot Stinson was not flustered; his three companions, well aware of his record of 16,000 hr. in the air, were not frightened. He slanted toward the lights of Chicago's Jackson Park in an easy glide, reached it with altitude to spare when--Crash! The ship struck a steel flagpole, and bored into the ground. The four men were hurt. Pilot Stinson so severely that he died seven hours later. Early famed as a barnstormer with his brother Jack, his sisters Katherine and Margery--the "Flying Stinsons"--"Eddie" Stinson had for three years been associated with Motorman Errett Lobban Cord who bought control of Stinson Aircraft Corp.

*Imperial ships are picturesquely named: Biplanes: Heracles, Horatius, Hengist, Hannibal, Helena, etc.; City of Baghdad, City of Cape Town, City of Liverpool, etc. Flying boats: Scipio, Sylvanus, Satyrus. Monoplanes (under construction): Atalanta, Amalthea, Andromeda, Arethusa, etc. To all employes go printed instructions for correct pronunciation of the names.

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