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Aviation History
1934
1934 - 1190.PDF
FLIGHT. NOVEMBER 15, 1934. ON BELITTLING AN ACHIEVEMENT Sir Philip Sassoon, in this Special Article for " Flight," Criticises the Attitude of the Lay Press tozvards Britain's Melbourne Race Success : Is it Modesty—or just Perversity? THERE is a curious and perverse habit too preva-lent among English people of disparaging any-thing which our own countrymen have done andof lavishing extravagent praise upon the achieve- ments of other nations. It may be modesty, but it is undoubtedly bad business. Only a very few of our neighbours who know us best—and sometimes write de- lightful books about us which only Englishmen read and every English reader thoroughly enjoys—really under- stand our idiosyncrasies. The thousand and one foreigners to whom we hope to sell our goods take what we say about ourselves at its face value. That does not help us to sell our goods. Advertisement There could scarcely be a better example of the sort of thing I mean than the articles and com- ments which have been appearing broadcast in the English Press (with certain honourable excep- tions) about the Melbourne Air Race. We won that race with a British machine using British engines and flown by British pilots. Nevertheless, the aeroplane manufacturers and the pilots who, so far, have got the best advertisement out of the race in the English Press are the Doug- las Company of America and Par- mentier and Moll, of the Dutch K.L.M. Yet, if the English Press wanted to say nice things about the British performance in the race, it would not be difficult for them to do so. It is surely a sufficiently remarkable achievement that Messrs. Scott and Campbell-Black, in their De Havilland " Comet," should have won both the Speed Race and the Handicap Race, the former by a margin of nineteen and a half hours, and the latter by a margin of nearly twelve hours. They might add that, of the other two "Comets" in the race, one led the whole field and beat all records to Karachi, while the other, after obtaining fourth place in the Speed Race, set up a new record by doing the round trip to Melbourne and back in a little over thirteen days. Even more significant of the general excellence of the products of the British aircraft industry is the official placing in the Handicap Race. Not only did a British machine win it, but six out of the first seven places went to British machines—counting the Danish pilot Hansen's Desoutter Mark II, with its 120 h.p. "Gipsy III" engine, as British for the occasion. It is no discredit, either, to the British aircraft in- dustry that of the sixty-four original entrants for the race only twenty started, and that of those twenty no fewer than fourteen were British machines and engines. With such a lot" of good British material to choose from it does seem rather a pity that so much attention should have been concentrated upon the performance of the American machines, which, after all, did not win either of the events. The Boeing, indeed, was not placed in the Handicap Race at all, and even the Douglas, with its two Wright "Cyclone" engines, was on handicap less than three hours in front of Mr. Melrose's " Puss Moth " with its single 130 h.p. "Gipsy Major." As usual, mere statistics do not tell the whole story. The air policy of the United States of America has permitted the payment to the American air transport companies of annual subsidies far in excess of anything that could even be considered in Great Britain. The result has been that for some time past air transport in America has been able to run at substantially greater speeds than Imperial Air- ways have yet attempted. The Douglas D.C.2 was not, there- fore, specially constructed for this particular race. It is an ordinary production job which has not only gone through all the usual tests, but has had the very real addi- tional advantage of practical ex- perience in continuous flying. A Triumph The Right Hon. Sir Philip Sassoon, G.B.E., C.M.G., M.P., Under-Secretary of State for Air. Because Imperial Airways have built their fleet not only to give safe and comfortable service, but also to pay dividends to share- holders with the least possible re- liance upon State subsidies, there has been no demand for, and there did not exist in this country, a commercial aeroplane of the type of the Douglas D.C.2. Very early in the preparations for the race it became obvious that, if Britain was to have any real chance of winning the Speed Race, special machines would have to be designed to meet the conditions under which the race would be flown. The real triumph of the race, therefore, is the unique achievement of the De Havilland Company in designing and constructing in record time a special machine and engine for a particular purpose, and in sending it out, practically straight from the stocks, to win the race both on speed and handicap. There was no time for trial and error, no opportunity to try out machine or engine under service conditions before the race. The race itself was to be the trial run. That the company succeeded is evidence of a degree of designing skill, of technical effi- ciency, and of reliability in craftsmanship of which the whole British aircraft industry is entitled to be proud. Unless I am misinformed there was another machine which was specially built for the race, namely, the
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