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Aviation History
1939
1939 - 0148.PDF
66 FLIGHT. JANUARY 19, 1939 COMMERCIAL AVIATION A POSSIBLE LANDMARK for Trans-Tasman pilots : 9,oooft.-high Mount Egmont. With its peak above the clouds, can generally be picked up a hundred miles from land. Mount Egmont is an extinct volcano and rises sheer and solitary from the Wanganui plain. THE WEEK AT CROYDON " A. Viator " Displays an Indisposition to Regard the Week's Happenings with Due Seriousness ON Thursday last another " F " class liner was delivered by De Havilland to Imperial Airways, making three up to date. This was Fortuna, and on Friday Capt. Jimmy Youell took the new machine on a trial flight on the Zurich run, where something able to compete with the Swissair Douglas D.C.3 has long been needed from a British point of view. Frobipher, I am informed, has been fitted with three- bladed props all round, which are said to improve take-off, decrease vibration, increase economy and leave speed where it was. If I were you I would not believe, without further enquiry, the rumour that standardisation has yet gone so far as the importation of Manx maintenance staff wearing their tripartite pants. Thrilling times we do have, to be sure. Our shrubbery, home of many a feathered what-not up to now, has sud denly become alive with furtive little folk in bowler hats digging holes. Walk past and rattle the bushes with your umbrella and see a startled face and drooping moustache bob up from every bush. The recent importation of cart loads of straw suggests the worst—that they are going to nest there in the spring. Then there is the mystery man with charts of the whole heating system under his arm, who darts into our offices and taps the radiators with his little hammer. Some say he is an ex-railwayman who did not get a square deal from life, having been put on to tap the wheels of non-stop expresses at a small wayside station, and that he is suffer ing from suppressed tappage. Others believe he is an in ternational spy, signalling to a pal at the other end of the hot-water system, and everyone wishes he would stop it and buy a xylophone instead. From time to time, first in Holland and then in England, experiments have been made to test the efficacy of high flying as a cure for whooping-cough. This should not be confused, by the way, with whoopee cough, which racks your chest and rocks the bathroom walls the morning after a party, causing the mirror to depict you as a sere and yellow centenarian surrounded by a dense swarm of entirely non-existent dancing midges. High flying is no cure for this, and, indeed, it has been known to lead to even more severe attacks of whoopee. The results obtained by the experiments have not been published, but not content to let sleeping germs lie, a news paper correspondent recently tried out high flying as a cure for the common cold. Carefully selecting victims, it is supposed, who had impeached the veracity of his stories, secretly watered his beer or otherwise insulted him, he had them taken up to incredible heights, and obtained con siderable kick from the results. Victim No. 1, who earned his living snuffing in the beech leaves of our woodlands for truffles, entirely lost his sense of smell, whilst the second subject, a professional tea- taster, has since O.K.'d a sample of onion soup in mistake for fine Bohea. PatientNo. 3, a prominent member of the Noise Abatement League, has gone stone deaf and can no longer grumble; whilst the fourth case, a man who hates vocal music, is afflicted by a continuous singing in the ears. Otherwise, the experiment was a huge success. A wireless message, fit to gladden the hearts of those bachelors and spinsters who worry themselves to twitters over the falling birth-rate and consequent speedy end of the world, was received at Croydon last week. It read somewhat as follows: '' Aeroplane X left Y for Croydon 13.00 hours. Pilot Z with 16 children." Nice to be a wealthy airline pilot, able to feed, clothe and educate 16 offspring, to say nothing of bailing them out of Vine Street in a body after Boat-race night, when they approach years of discretion. As a matter of fact, the children were refugees, and, if anything ever showed how necessary the services of air hostesses may be, it was this trip with 16 kiddies from Prague to Croydon. The finest testimonial was presented by one little creature of three years, who, when handed to its mother on arrival, howled dolorously (and apparently (Concluded at foot of next page.)
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