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Aviation History
1938
1938 - 1724.PDF
-6oo FLIGHT. JUNE 16, 1938. COMMERCIAL AVIATION (CONTINUED) : WORLD NEWS Indian Incident T AST Sunday an Imperial Airways boat was forced down -Lf by the monsoon when flying between Karachi and Gwalior. Captain Gurney put the machine down in shallow water on Lake Dingari, in Tonk State, and it appears that it may be necessary to dismantle the boat. The passengers and mail were taken on to Gwalior, where they continued the journey in another machine. New D.C.3s for KIM. A BATCH of improved Douglas D.C.3S is about to be de-livered to K L.M. The new type is the first to be exported from America with Cyclone G-100 engines and marks the first commercial installation in Europe of the new Curtiss electrically controlled "fully feathering" airscrews. Among the newly introduced features which distinguish the G-100 Cyclone from its predecessors are the new Chandler Groves carburetter and the steel main crank case section. Although this latter has slightly increased the total weight of the engine it has permitted an actual reduction in specific weight of 0.04 Ib./h.p. The take-off rating is 1,100 h.p. The Chandler Groves carburetter is claimed not only to be impervious to the effects of icing, but automatically to com- pensate for variations in operating altitude without the use of complicated automatic mixture control devices. The design is such that the necessity fox a large air pre-heater to prevent ice formation has been eliminated. Fuel consumption is given as o.43?b./h.p./hr. at cruising speed. The Wright two-speed supercharger is optional equipment. As a matter of interest the Cyclones which powered the Boeing B-17 bombers on their recent flight to Buenos Aires and back (during which they reached over 25,000ft., while crossing the Andes) had blowers of this sort. ;;:.-.v ; The Empire Fleet WITHIN the next week or two it is expected that Ensignand Egeria, the first of the fourteen Armstrong-Whit- worth monoplanes ordered by Imperial Airways, will be in service. Ensign has completed its tests at Martlesham, and Egeria should by now be ready. .Eight of these machines are destined for use on the service to India, while the others will presumably be used on the European routes. How this position will be modified when and if the new scheme in which British Airways will take over the majority of the European routes conies into force remains to be seen. When the machines have been delivered, Indian Transcontinental Airways will cease to operate between Karachi and Singapore and will take over four Ensigns with which they will run between Croydon and Calcutta in pool with Imperial Airways. The same system, of course, is applied in the case of Qantas Empire Airways, whose Empire boats will be flown through to Southampton alternately with those of Imperial Airways. Incidentally, several of the Short Empire boats are to be fitted with special commercial versions of the Bristol Perseus XII sleeve-valve engines, which have a take-off power of 900 h.p. It will be remembered that Imperial Airways have done quite a lot of test flying on their routes with the sleeve-valve type of engine. Percival Q for Radio Tests THE Australian Civil Aviation Board has ordered aPercival Cj for the testing of ground radio equipment and, particularly, for ultra-short-wave approach and beam work. The equipment of the main east coast aerodromes will be com- pleted with the new gear in a month or two. The S.A.A. Fleet TWO Junkers Ju.90 forty-seaters have been ordered by SouthAfrican Airways, and are expected to be delivered next year. They are to be used on the Johannesburg-Durban-Cape- town service. Seven more Junkers have still to be delivered to complete orders placed some time ago by the company. These are all of the Ju.86 type, and they will be brought out by S.A.A. pilots in July. After their arrival the company will have nineteen Ju.86 ten-seaters and eleven Ju.52 sixteen-seaters in its fleet. Qantas Gets Ready fOOLANGATTA and Cooee, two of the six Short Empire v boats which have been allocated to Qantas Empire Air- ways, are now in Australia, and are being used by the pilots for advanced training preparatory to the opening of the through service later this summer. As in the case of Imperial Airways intensive training has been, and is still, necessary for the Qantas pilots, who have had little or no experience of the operation of flying boats. The other boats in the Qantas fleet are called Carpentaria, Coogee, Corio, and Coorong. Such is the result of naming a fleet according to a system. The through boat service to Australia will virtually start on July 2, when a Qantas machine will leave Singapore for Sydney. At first, mails only will be carried and the boats will not fly through to England. The Athens Accident AFTER a silence of more than eight months, the AirMinistry has at last issued a precis of a report from the Greek Government following the enquiry into the causes of the accident to the Imperial Airways boat Courtier, which crashed at Athens, with a loss of three lives, on October 1, 1937- Apparently the pilot was misled by the smooth surface of the sea and by the phenomenon of reflection characteristic in such circumstances. He failed to flatten out and the boat touched the water at a comparatively high speed and steep angle so that the hull was severely damaged. The cause has been attributed to an error of judgment on the part of the pilot in that, instead of estimating his height by means of the coast or the various buoys in the Bay, he endeavoured to do so by observation of the surface; he did not make a circuit before the landing, but came straight in. The failure to save all the passengers has been attributed partly to the severity of the damage and partly to the fact that the facilities for exit from the passenger compartment to the upper part of the hull proved to be insufficient. The Air Ministry adds a note to the effect that all the Empire boats now in service have been provided with additional exits and that the cabin windows have been redesigned so that they may be pushed out. A DIFFERENT D.C.3 : The first of K.L.M.'s Douglas D.C.3 twenty-one seaters with G.ioo Wright Cyclones and Curtiss fully-feathering variable-pitch airscrews. The engines are rated at 1,100 h.p. for take-off and use 90-octane fuel.
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