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Aviation History
1933
1933 - 1262.PDF
FLIGHT, DECEMBER 21, 1933 Eastern Bengal and Assam, which was instituted by Lord Curzon when he was Viceroy. This so-called : ' partition of Bengal " was finally revoked, but Dacca remains an important spot, and a speedy link with Calcutta will be advantageous to it. The second of the services, Calcutta-Rangoon, is supple mentary to the main trunk line, and will provide a connection on alternate days. The third service, Karachi-Lahore, is interesting, because the Director of Civil Aviation said that it would be for mails pnly, and also because the route to be followed presented some problems, owing to the North-West Frontier Province being a prohibited area for civil aircraft. The new service will, therefore, merely hurry the Home mails for the Punjab up to the provincial capital, Lahore, via the important district towns of Jacobabad and Multan. The mails are to be pushed through really fast. Capt. Tymms said that the aircraft used must have a cruising speed of 130 m.p.h. Of course, he did not specify what type of machine would be used, but the mind naturally turns at once to the Avro mailplane, which has recently been fitted with the Armstrong-Siddeley 600 h.p. " Tiger " instead of the " Panther," with great advantage to its speed. The other service to be instituted is between Bom bay and Calcutta, which Capt. Tymms said was destined to be the heaviest traffic-bearing airway in India. That is natural, as it would connect the two largest cities and most important centres of commerce in the country. From the report which we have received, it would appear that the Tata firm were expected to tender for this service. Did one not recognise that the depression accounted for many things, one would find it rather hard to understand why India did not institute a Bombay-Calcutta air mail years ago, without waiting for Imperial Airways to arrive at Karachi. There would have been a great advantage in connecting with the mail steamer at Bombay, and hurrying the mails across India to Calcutta. Now each year will see more and more of the mails arriving at Karachi instead of at Bombay, and the utility of a Bombay-Calcutta airway must be decreased accordingly. At the same time, one must confess that this route was one which had to await the production of the right type of aeroplane. It would have been useless to compete with the train until the aeroplane could cover the 1,050 miles in the daylight hours of an Indian day (which is not nearly so long as an English summer day), or, failing that, could fly by night. Even now it is not certain that the British aircraft industry has produced a machine which will fulfil Capt. Tymms' require ments. He stipulates for a mail-carrier which has a normal cruising speed of 175 m.p.h. with a load of 1,000 lb. of mails, and an endurance of 1,250 miles. The Boulton and Paul mailplane came within the class indicated by Capt. Tymms, and a second machine, modified in the light of the experience gained by the first, might well fulfil his requirements, and perhaps a bit more. The service contemplated is to be daily, and it is estimated that five mailplanes will be required to keep it going. 3^Q It is extremely interesting to see India, the East which Kipling said it is fatal to hustle, demanding cruising speeds of 130 and 175 m.p.h. It is very healthy to get these demands from the Dominions. It wakes us up. It is not that our aircraft industry is exactly somnolent, and it is not that it is in any way incapable of supplying the demand. The fact is that hitherto it has not seen any sufficiently great demand for such speed as compared with other characteristics. Now a definite demand comes from India. At present it is only a demand for a moderate number of aircraft, but it is a presage of more to come. The possibilities of India are not unlimited, but they are great. One of the limitations of India is that there are now, and probably in the future will be, only a small number of persons in the country who can pay for high speed as passengers. Mails, however, already demand speedy transport, and this demand will certainly grow. The programme out lined by Capt. Tymms is only a beginning, and it still leaves many places of importance without an air mail delivery. We cannot consider the situation satisfactory until we are able to name many more than two types of British aeroplanes which can satisfy the speed demands of India. We sincerely trust that because Capt. Tymms said that the Bombay-Calcutta service would only call for about five machines, the Trade will not say to itself that India is not worth con sidering. India may only need a few aeroplanes at present, but she will need many more before long, and the firm which gets in on the ground floor of the Indian market should in the future reap a satisfactory reward. The inquest on Fit. Lt. J. B. Allen, pilot to the Duchess of Bedford, who was killed when flying after dark a few days ago, strongly suggests that the accident was due to the pilot suddenly finding him self confronted with a pylon of the That Grid electricity grid, and losing control of the machine in a sudden turn to avoid it. If that be the case, then the death of a fine pilot must certainly be put down to the debit account ot the grid, and, what is more, unless something is done quickly the grid will be the cause of many more deaths. In the last report on Civil Aviation in this country, it was mentioned that the Air Ministry had had under consideration three methods of lighting the cables at specially dangerous points. One was by attaching neon tubes to the cables themselves, which was rejected as unsatisfactory. The second was by indirect lighting from a projector lamp about 25 ft. away from the base of the pylon, which was under consideration at the end of the year, and the third was by hanging lamps on lattice masts of the same height as the cables. Naturally, this last scheme was estimated to be very expensive. Now that civil flying is increasing so fast the problem is likely to become very serious, and it is high time that lighting of the pylons should be undertaken with equal seriousness. 1278
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