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Aviation History
1940
1940 - 0041.PDF
JANUARY 4, 1940. and what not which were being cooked. Much the same idea seems to be in force at H n, where the pen is within sight, sound and smell of the restaurant. It is, however, mysteriously forbidden as part of the Defence of the Realm to allow a passenger to have even so much as a cup of tea. If anyone got a whisky-and-soda there, we should probably lose the war. Adolf's Christmas Tree I trust Adolf, in his mountain vultures' nest, had just exactly the sort of Christmas he deserves. I hear there was a Christmas tree there. I should love to have the decorating of it. How about a coal(less) scuttle for Adolf, a bladder of lard covered with tinsel stars for Goering, a boomerang-shaped rubber truncheon for Himmler, and for Goebbels a clever little adaptation of the lie detector. This one would whistle if he ever told the truth, and he could at once call in his pet alienist to escort him to the private padded cell which is kept aired and ready night and day for his reception. Von Papen could have an ersatz Turkey stuffed with diplomatic failures, and Ribbentrop something symbolic of his successes with Russia, such as a Samovar full of genuine prussic acid. A true Christmas touch might be provided by a choir of secret police trained to play a simple carol by shooting machine guns at various thicknesses of tin plate. Heil, Skuttler. The Captain of the Graf von Spee was an officer and a gentleman, but he had to take orders from one who is unfit to be the one and incapable of being the other. Capt. Langsdorff, I hear, was one of the many good-type Germans who eschewed that outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual inferiority complex, the Nazi salute, by a demonstration of which on a certain occasion the wine merchants' bag man, poor Ribbentrop, made such a con- summate ass of himself. Thus Capt. Langsdorff's death will be greeted with few but crocodile tears amongst the Nazi Thugmeisters of Berlin, who, naturally, loathe a gentleman. One thinks, too, of General Fritch, and that gives one Commercial Aviation to wonder if there is not a good deal of truth in the per- sistent rumour that most of the senior D.L.H. commercial pilots were killed off in Poland. They were a decent lot and possibly not very enthusiastic Thug worshippers, and the story goes that they were sent off to impossible objectives in impossible weather with old Junkers Ju. 52 'planes and either shot down by the enemy or shot up by their own anti-aircraft guns on the way home, having been allocated, it is said, a corridor so narrow that in all the circumstances it was extremely hard to keep to it and being promptly shot down by Nazi A.A. guns if they strayed out of it. How true this is I do not know, but it is certainly common report in neutral countries, and nobody would put it past the Nazi Thugmeisters to do a spot of garrotting of this sort. It is difficult to train people brought up in decent tradition in decent families to see honour and glory in machine-gunning unarmed fishermen in small boats or even struggling in the water, and not easy to persuade such men to wear iron crosses for deeds they have not per- formed. There is, for example, one ridiculous figure some- where in Germany prinking around in a medal he knows he has not earned, and he is the " hero " of the mythical Ark Royal sinking. Technique in training the youth of any National Soviet State, whether Russian or German, is much the same. I remember being told, on the best authority in Stockholm just before the war, that pilots and crews of the Soviet National Air Lines were not allowed to mix with their Swedish colleagues. When a Russian commercial 'plane came in the crew was whipped away to the Soviet Embassy by car and only released in time to travel to the airport again for the return flight. At Abo, or Helsinki, I saw Russian commercial 'planes, which looked far from clean or comfortable, and their crews standing around by themselves regarding everyone, including their passengers, with looks of lowering suspicion. So if you want to put over a tyranny of the worst sort, don't let your people mix with more enlightened folk. ..... A. VIATOR. Canadian Statistics ^ w.^ CANADA had 742 private pilots at the end of September,the largest number on record, according to a report from the Department of Transport, Ottawa. At the end of Septem- ber there were also licensed 204 commercial pilots, 219 limited commercial pilots, 163 transport pilots, 695 air engineers and 5 airport traffic control officers, the last a new classifica- tion made necessary by the transcontinental publicly owned airway. There were at the same date 83 private aeroplanes licensed, 418 commercial aeroplanes, and 127 airports. The 22 light aeroplane clubs for the first nine months of 1939 had flown a total of 18,783 hours, close to the record established for all of 1938, and surpassing every year except 1937 and 1938. There were 2,744 members in the 22 clubs, operating 84 aeroplanes. 788 members were under instruc- tion, 49 were granted private pilot licences in the quarter from July 1 to September 30, and 16 qualified for commercial licences in that same period. For the first half of 1939 air mail amounted to 910,991 lb. ...... . Mediterranean Accident THREE passengers and two of the crew have not been picked i- up from the Imperial Airways Lockheed 14 airliner, which was forced down on the sea between Sollum (300 miles west of Alexandria) and Malta on December 22. Three other pas- sengers and three of the crew were fortunate enough to be picked up by a French steamer off Sicily and landed at Malta. No distress signals were received from the aeroplane, but as soon as it was overdue, British. French and Italian authorities co-operated in the search. The missing are: Lieutenants Gage, Hocking and Riley and, of the crew, Messrs. Beach and Brent- nall. The airliner was flying from Alexandria to Malta Ihe mail for the United Kingdom, which was from ;the Belgran Congo, consisted of only a few letters. Moscow to Berlin F is reported that arrangements have been completed forthe establishment of a regular air service for mail andpassengers between Moscow and Berlin, starting on January 3. Pan American Statistics PAN AMERICAN AIRWAYS, whose 100th scheduled mail-and-passenger crossing of the Atlantic was made from Lisbon to New York on December 17, has carried 81,013 lb. of mail in the six months its transatlantic services have been operating. During the same period, 1,786 passengers have flown the ocean in the Clippers. But the average mail load of over 800 1b. per trip tells only a part of the story of the usefulness of this service to-day, for under wartime conditions the line is actually carrying more than half the mail coming to Europe from the United States and recent loads have been almost pheno- menal. Largest, early in December, and presumably made up of Christmas mail, totalled 4,108 1b. The six eastbound trips up to the middle of December averaged more than 2,800 lb. a trip. Westbound mail loads from Europe to the United States have been about half as large. Another American Extensionr was announced recently by the Aviation Manufacturing Corporation of New York that a new factory is to be built on a 36-acre plot adjoining the airport at Nashville, Tennessee. The new factory will have a floor space of 145,000 sq. ft., of which about 20^000 sq. ft. will be occupied by the administra- tive and drawing offices. The cost will be in the neighbour- hood of a quarter of a million dollars. It may be pointed out that the Aircraft Manufacturing Corporation includes the firms of Vultee (California), Stinson (Michigan) and Lycoming (Pennsylvania). Italian Misfortune THE newly established Italian line to South America hasbeen most unfortunate in having a bad crash so soon after the initial flight, which arrived safely at Rio de Janeiro on December 24. The accident occurred near Mogador in French Morocco on a flight from Spanish West Africa to Seville. Apparently the pilot was avoiding very bad weather by landing. After the crash the machine caught fire and three passengers and the crew of four were burnt to denth. The service will be continued to schedule.
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