FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1938
1938 - 0532.PDF
T86 FLIGHT. FEBRUARY 24, 1938. PRIVATE FLYINC Past and Future : A striking impression of the Stearman Hammond and one of K.L.M.'s D.C.2S on the tarmac at Croydon. The Hammond is, of course, being used to accustom the com- pany's pilots to the tricycle technique in preparation for possible operation of Douglas D.C.4S in due course. The Hammond is, how- ever, primarily interest- ing as a private type— or as the basis of future private types. Flight photograph.) Topics of the Day ComparisonsM OST of us have been involved at one time or another in arguments with ground-loving laymen concern- ing the relative value (at the present time and in the future) of the aeroplane as a means of private conveyance for the ordinary person, other than one travel- ling in the scientifically organised transport aeroplane. This argument is usually without possible end, and I often think that the comparisons made by the laymen can be very unfair. For instance, he may say that a private aeroplane will never be seriously considered by the ordinary person so long as so much experience—and navigational experience in particular—is necessary for its full value to be appre- ciated. You will be told that it is so easy to find your way while on the ground (signposts and things) and that you can always stop to ask some person if there is any doubt in the matter. Certainly, it is not usually possible to come down in order to ask anyone to explain the way to such and such a place, but for the life of me I cannot see why it should be necessary to do so. In your car, without a compass and on a road flanked by tall hedgrows, it is possible to lose your sense of direction entirely, but from an aeroplane you can, in almost the worst conditions, see quite a reason- ably wide area from which to choose a landmark, and your compass will (or should) tell you in which direction you are travelling. To the amateur pilots of this generation it is sometimes possible to get lost, but the man who argues about the com- parative difficulties of air navigation entirely forgets that we have only been travelling above the earth for a couple of decades and the whole thing still appears a little strange. The schoolboy of fifteen years has probably put in more hours on his bicycle than any of us have in our aeroplanes. By the time he is thirty years of age he has probably motored or cycled for a matter of at least ten thousand hours, and there are very few professional pilots who have done more in the air. Hedge-hopping BECAUSE the human race has, since it descended eitherfrom the trees or clouds, been forced to creep about the earth, the layman invariably imagines that if only it would be safe to fly everywhere at an altitude of, say, a hundred feet he would have no difficulties. The fact that if he multiplies this height by ten he would be able to see so much more of the landscape is probably realised, but he is not used to seeing objects which are not only fore- shortened and of a strange shape, but are also in such small sizes. If he could see the expressions on the pedestrians' faces as he swept up the Great North Road on his way to Plymouth (having taken the wrong turning at Hyde Park Corner) he imagines he would feel so much happier in his insecure position and so much more certain that he could tell whether he was in Huntingdon or Hampshire. I admit that flying from place to place would l)e very much better fun if we could always fly at fifty feet, pulling up sharply over the taller trees and chimney-stacks. After the first twenty or thirty hours of our cross-country ex- perience, when the excitement of picking up landmarks as and when they should appear has to some extent died down, I must confess that cross-country flying at a safe two thousand feet can be very boring. That is why I am always keen about navigational devices, which so help to relieve the tedium. Nevertheless, the word " tedium " might aptly be trans- lated as mental comfort, and one of the most pleasant features of flying as a means of personal transport over long distances is that, at any rate in good weather, there is practically nothing to worry about. You simply work out a few approximate E.T.A.s. for the more useful landmarks on your track and peer out at these times to see if the landmarks have duly cropped up; if they haven't, then there is almost bound to be a large and unmistakably shaped reservoir or a useful railway junction which will enable you to pin-point your position. Once the first ten minutes of the journey have passed by with everything coming up like clockwork, it is hardly possible to be more than five miles out unless a gale springs up from the opposite direc- tion to that at which it was plotted on jour C.D.C. Vertical THIS passion for low flying brings up the possibilitiesof the rotating-winged type of machine, which is also imagined, and perhaps rightly, as the only development likely to bring in an era of flying for the many rather than for the few. With a perfected machine on these lines it should certainly be possible to treat every decent-sized field as a prospective landing area and, more important, as a prospec- tive take off ground. Much as I (and, for that matter, everyone else) hope that the rotating-winged machine will very shortly reach a really useful state of development, even this excellent device can- not be considered as the answer to every one of our problems. Admittedly, it should be possible to stop almost dead (without actually dying), and this characteristic might be very useful in certain circumstances. The multiplication of possible flying fields, too, would be worth a very great deal. Nevertheless, the traffic question would still be with us, especially where the English climate is concerned. However slowly you may fly and however near to the ground it may be possible to travel without any appre- ciable danger, the movements of even five thousand privately owned machines would eventually need to be very carefully regulated. There is nothing terrible or dictatorial about the idon of
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
