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Aviation History
1934
1934 - 1293.PDF
DECEMBER 6, 1934. FLIGHT. -297 Roanne aerodrome was very soft and bumpy as well as small. Back at Paray we bargained with the patron of the Hotel Terminus, who had come up with a well-worn Citroen car to "get" us. He weighed about twenty-four stone, but we all got in somehow, although his son had to come with another ramshackle vehicle and take the luggage. That hotel wasn't too bad, although I believe a few voracious petits animeaux found the taste of English blood much to their liking. Anyhow, we were in the Eeaujolais country, and the French Air Force officers knew how to keep a party going! Six-fifteen a.m. the next morning saw us out on the aerodrome watching the sun rise with hard fiery brilliance over the tops of the distant mountains. By 6.45 we had pushed the '' Dragon '' out; I had packed our luggage into the after end of the cabin—instead of in the luggage locker nearer the tail—to keep the weight as far forward as possible, and soon we were heading into that sun with relieved feelings when we saw that we could get between the cloud base and the tops of the mountains with ease. We went direct over Charolles to Macon so as to get over the mountains as quickly as possible ; then, once we got into the Rhone valley, our luck changed, and, with a hefty Mistral wind blowing us southwards, we covered the 250- odd miles from Paray to Marseilles in two hours, includ- ing a circuit of Lyons, to let them know that we were not landing as Paray had advised them we might do. We fairly rocketed down past Montelimar and Avignon, making Bear, who had started on this trip without ever having flown before, wish he had never been born. The Mistral, blowing off the mountains as it does, is about one of the bumpiest winds you can find. The Mediterranean At Marseille we were in great hopes of making up some of our wasted time and catching up our schedule again, but, despite the help of the Customs, who cleared us as quickly as they could, it was some three hours later before we finally got away. This was the first and only place where our refuelling arrangements let us down. Appar- ently the staff is unable to refuel a flying boat up in the Etang de Berre without taking all their men away from the aerodrome, so we just had to sit in the unattractive fly-blown cafe over our coffee and omelettes until they had finished. When they came they didn't even run to a proper pump, but had to roll barrels out to us and pump the petrol in by a hand pump stuck in the bungholes. Marseille is a very good place at which to get weather reports, as the met. officer on the aerodrome has his own organisation there, and is always ready to explain the charts and give pilots forecasts. "Archibald " had by this time passed well to the East, so when we took off we were hopeful of making Pisa without further trouble. The clouds were quite high and let us get over the moun- tains behind Toulon and strike the coast at Nice. It had turned out quite sunny by then, and that trip was really glorious. It was still a bit bumpy, but the further we went the less the Mistral affected us and the better Bear felt. At Nice, where we met the Mediterranean, we had to become reconciled to going over water for hours on end. This didn't really worry us very much. Our two Gipsy Major engines showed no signs of wanting the attentions of Gatrell (who, incidentally is on the staff at Rollason's at Croydon, and looks after this machine in the normal course of his work), and, even if one did stop—an exceed- ingly unlikely occurrence—we knew that we could keep up on one engine, although we might have to drop some of the baggage to give us a reasonably wide margin of safety in that condition. However, it was not until later on that we really got bold and came to think nothing of 300 miles across the water. What we ought to have done was to have gone direct from Marseille or Cannes, over Corsica to Cagliari in Sardinia, and thence to Tunis. That would have saved us nearly two days, but we had our schedule laid out for the route down the Italian coast, besides which the Italian Air Ministry had been warned of our trip, and we also wanted to see how aviation was run in Italy. After leaving Cannes the coast has to be followed, as inland is a prohibited area. Monte Carlo, San Remo, and the Ligurian Alps looked sparkling and beautiful, and soon restored our spirits, which had been damped so much by the past murky weather. When we got near Savona we began to think about saving time again. The weather was beginning to look rather forbidding, and in the distance we could see thunderstorms with their occasional flashes of lightning flickering down. Morton passed a note back asking me to lay off a course from where we were, direct to Pisa, straight across the Gulf of Genoa, a distance of about a hundred miles. So I got my Simmonds-Goudime Course and Distance Calculator to work, checked up the wind as near as I could with the help of the waves and the weather report we had got at Marseille, and gave it to him, together with an E.T.A. (Estimated Time of Arrival), which would be a help if it got much thicker and we lost sight of the coast altogether. It did get rather thick and we ran into a lot of rain, but Spezia, around which is a prohibited area, stands out from some distance. Our arrival at Pisa was just a little hectic, as we had to dodge between extremely heavy rain and thunderstorms with exceptionally unpleasant-looking lightning. However, we got in and found the large aerodrome without any diffi- culty, as the Leaning Tower makes an excellent landmark. Pisa is a grand place at which to land. Like many Italian aerodromes, it is labelled as a civil airport, but is in effect military, so that there are plenty of men about to help you, and everyone seems interested in you and your welfare. The Customs officials are punctilious but courteous, and, provided you don't make things difficult for them but realise that they have their job to do, you can get through fairly easily and quickly. Here we had our first taste of a petty restriction which is both pointless and annoying; that is having to have the cameras scaled up so that no photographs can be taken from the air. In order to avoid any chance of delay we had declared our cameras by an entry in the log book, and they now had to be produced, bound round with string, and the knot sealed with a lead seal. It is possible to get permission to unseal them after you have landed and take photo- graphs in the towns, but it takes away much of the interest if you can't operate them from the air as you fly. Pisa's Leaning Tower The director of the airport did everything he could to help us, even to making special arrangements whereby the '' Dragon " would be got out early the next morning ready for us to start soon after dawn. He advised us to go to the Hotel Nettuno, which, though a little noisy, was fairly cheap and very comfortable. After some tea we duly did our duty by going to see the Leaning Tower. We found it far more beautiful than we had imagined, and the duty became a real pleasure. It was dark by the time we reached it, but it was flood-lit with a pale greeny-blue light which brought out the natural beauty of the stone', and, with the cathedral alongside, made a most impressive sight. Our " dawn " start was rather late from Pisa, because it was here that we first ran up against the solicitous attitude adopted by the Italian authorities. They will not let you start without getting a weather report and making you sign for it before you go, and it was after 7.30 a.m. before we could get that report. In the direction of the prevailing wind Pisa aerodrome is large, and there was no need for us to do our numbered take-off; the new arrival must look out for rather a large number of high-tension cables and wireless masts in the immediate neighbourhood, but, apart from these, the approaches are very good, as the sur- rounding country is quite flat. It is said that the surface of the aerodrome sometimes becomes a bit soft after very heavy rain, but the director told us that it was being re- drained, so probably that deficiency will shortly disappear. Rome was our next objective. (To be continued.)
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