AERONAUTICS: A Safety Code

Since the inception of the London-Paris air routes, 37 persons have lost their lives and 12 have been seriously injured. These accidents are so spectacular that they draw attention away from the enormous mileage of steady, uneventful flying. On the British and Dutch air lines, for the last three years, the average number of passenger air miles per passenger fatality was 2,663,000.*

Safety in flying is steadily increasing. Complete safety will not be attained by the addition of some miraculous device but rather by a careful attention to details in structure and operation of aircraft. Our engineers are not idle. Early in 1925 will be issued Part I of the Aeronautical Safety Code sponsored by the Bureau of Standards and Society of Automotive Engineers. If its provisions are faithfully followed, accidents and their effects will be minimized. An explosion such as that at Croydon would probably be avoided by the use of “crashproof” tanks which the code calls for, and by placing the tanks as far as possible from the engine, particularly not along the line of the motor and the longitudinal axis of the machine. The inherent stability which the code insists on would lessen chances of losing-control. Grover C. Loening, famed aeronautical engineer, has suggested that crash-proof passenger cabins might be built, immune from injury no matter the height of fall. This may be too much to hope for. The code at least demands that all edges of cockpits shall be well padded and that the padding should be extended to cover the front, part of cockpit or passenger cabin against which the heads of pilot or passenger are likely to strike.

*According to Major General Mason M. Patrick of the U.S.Army Air Service, for a number of years prior to 1913, there was an average of one passenger casualty on U.S. railroads for about every 2,000,000 miles.