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Aviation History
1936
1936 - 0603.PDF
264 FLIGHT. MARCH 5, 1936. Commercial Aviation made—regarding cockpit visibility, I believe. After all, the man who must live in a house is entitled to point out to the house architect that, in his eagerness for artistic sym metry, he has forgotten the stairs. Talking of stairs, I hear that in the new boats captains will need to start going aboard a quarter of an hour earlier, since they have to traverse gangways, wander up companionways, and pop through hatchways before march ing down corridors and passages to the cockpit, bridge, or engine-room. It all sounds so magnificent that the next step should be a bo's'un to pipe them aboard. On March 1 several service alterations were made. K.L.M. machines now leave at 8.10 and not 8.20, and the 13.30 departure is cancelled in favour of one at 11.20. D.L.H. now leaves Croydon at 15.00 instead of at n.30. With the B.C.A. morning service from Croydon, Holland is indeed well served. In summer there will be at least seven services daily to Holland from this airport alone. K.L.M. also announced the reopening of the London- Prague line from March 2, and passengers leaving London to catch the Amsterdam-Batavia machine on the follow- Norwegian Rationalisation THE two active Norwegian airline companies, Det Norske Luftfartsselskap and Wideroes Flyveselskap, are con templating a combine. It is learned that the D.N.L. intends to acquire a controlling block of shares in the W.F.S. At the same time the W.F.S. will increase their stock capital from 150,000 Kroner to 500,000 or 600,000 Kroner in order to maintain new services It is also possible that W.F.S. will take charge of the night-mail service to Gothenburg. A New Empire Schedule STARTING with the eastbound service to India and Malaya on March 18, the scheduled dates of departure of Imperial Airways' Empire services from London will be slightly modi fied. The changes are being made in order to give the best possible service to the greatest number of points along the Empire routes and will result, in many cases, in the saving of from one to three days in the time taken to obtain a reply to a letter. The eastbound services will, after this date, leave on Wednesday (previously Tuesday) for Egypt, India and Malaya. The Saturday service remains unchanged. After March 20 the southbound services will leave London every Friday and Tuesday (previously every Wednesday and Sunday). No alteration will be made in the timing. Incoming Empire services will be unaltered, with the excep tion that the westbound service from Malaya, India and Egypt will be due to reach London on Thursdays instead of Fridays. Mass Overhaul DURING last week the Rollason Aircraft Services' Croydon shops were filled with a more than usually interesting assortment of jobs. Apart from work on the Atalanta wings and on one of the remaining Imperial Wessexes, which is being fitted with dual control for training purposes and is almost finished, there "is another Airspeed Ferry in for com plete overhaul and both a D.H. Dragon and Rapide owned by British Continental Airways. The Ferry is. like the first, to be used by Scott's circus, and has been lying about in a wet hangar for a very long time —it was originally owned by Midland and Scottish Air Ferries. Ferry Number One is now almost complete and has been fitted with two Gipsy Major outboard engines in place of the original Gipsy II's Such a change has, of course, necessitated quite a lot of detail re-designing, and the result is rather interest ing. It would hardly have been thought that the Wessex conversions were worth while (another is being modified by Imperials), since they must have cost a considerable sum, but the only alternative would have been to purchase a couple of twin-engined machines such as D.H. 90s. Since Rollason's spindling machine is the only one available at Crovdon it has brought in a lot of good work—including that on the Atalanta wings. The demonstration Hornet is at present being converted to the 1936 type, with square wing tips, and one D.H. 90 Dragonfly has already been sold by Rollasons. ing morning now have the choice of the K.L.M. 11.20 and the D.L.H. 13.00 services. The passenger lists last week included Mr. Tata, of Tata Sons, Bombay, the firm which operates the well- known mail service, and Miss Cecilia Colledge, who went to" Berlin by D.L.H. on Saturday, gave a skating exhibi tion there on Sunday, and returned on Monday. Capt. Jimmy Ypuell has been testing the Vickers Viastra preparatory to blind approach work. This machine, of course, belonged to H.M. the King when Prince of Wales, and it has now been stripped of its beautiful interior decorations, and has become a severely practical member of the working classes. Air France schedules a new service from March 1 in addition to those already operating. It leaves both Crov don and Le Bourget at 16.00, thus depositing the traveller at his destination in ample time for a cocktail before dinner. The four Fokker machines bought by Crilly Airways appear to have joined the British Airways fleet, and sud denly found themselves on the London-Paris line. A. VIATOR. The Indian National Subsidy IT appears that the advice of the Standing Committee against the proposed Indian National Airways' subsidy will not, after all, be taken. So Sir James Grigg, the finance member of the Government of India, announced to the Assembly last week. Australian Duplication THE Government of Australia has approved the duplication of the Qantas service between Singapore and Brisbane— which means that the air service to Australia will presently be operated twice weekly throughout. Internal connecting ser vices in Australia will also be duplicated in due course. Twenty of a Kind THE total order for twenty Potez-62s by Air France will make this twin-engined fourteen-seater one of the most ubiquitous machines on the regular services. The first seven, fitted with Gnome-Rhone K 14s, are on the Loridon-Paris- Lyons-Marseilles-Madrid line—actually only six of these remain, as one was destroyed by a fire at Auxerre last Decem ber. The eighth, with Hamilton variable-pitch airscrews and Hispano Suiza 12-XBRS-1 engines, has reached Buenos Aires and will be used on the trans-Andean section of the South American mail service. The ninth to the fourteenth (Gnome-Rhone K 14s) are for service on the Far Eastern line between Damascus and Hanoi. The fifteenth to seventeenth (Hispano 12-XBRS-1) will ply between Natal and Buenos Aires. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth (Gnome-Rhone K 14s) will stay in Europe, but the eighteenth will ultimately join the Far Eastern line. Fogbound IN spite of the various stories which were told and re-told aftt r the unhappy morning when the Paris newspaper machines were prevented by fog from returning to Croydon and when a K.L.M. machine had to return to Rotterdam, things were not as bad as all that. Mr. J. W. Duggan, know ing that Croydon was likely to be fog-bound, re-fuelled to the limit at Le Bourget, crossed the Channel, and waited near Croydon while the pilot df the K.L.M. machine decided that a landing was impossible. He continued to wait, but did not receive permission to come in and returned to the coast. Portsmouth and South ampton were weatherbound, and, though Brighton could be seen, Shoreham airport was impossible. He flew along the coast, quite well able to pull off an emergency landing, bu- hoping that something better would turn up while still carry ing plenty of fuel: Lympne was fogbound, but he_ knew that Littlestone was possible. While making his. eventual approach he saw another machine on the aerodrome. I'" Commercial Air Hire pilot, Mr. Eric Noddings, had also found Littlestone. On the following day Mr. Duggan brought the Dragon back to Croydon with a visibility of 400 yards. Wrightways have a number of Gipsy engines in for ovet- haul, and their second Dragon, with the P.B. automatic pilot, should be in service again quite shortly.
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