AERONAUTICS: Sowing

In Manitoba, the Department of Agriculture, having perused a survey by Professor V. W. Jackson which showed no wild rice crops in Canadian lakes north of 53°, sent sacks of wild rice to Lake Cormorant to be strewn over suitable marshes by airplane and thus to restore the natural food of countless wild ducks, observed flying south of late years during the rice season (August-September).

Tired Gull

One Thomas Marshall, fisherman, looked up from nets he was tending in the middle of the English Channel and squinted off over five miles of tossing grey water. Aye, there could be no doubt of it, she was coming down, on a long slant like a tired gull. It was too far off to see a splash, but Thomas Marshall had trawled the English Channel long enough to know a London-to-Paris airliner when he saw one. He did not hesitate. Rather than delay to haul in his nets, he bade his crew hack them free and pointed his smack’s nose towards the spot where the splash must have been.

At that spot, the next 20 minutes were tense. Well aloft, one engine of the double-motored Imperial Airways liner had coughed peevishly and stopped dead. The mechanic had instantly scrambled out to mend it, but returned at once to the cockpit. With twelve people and their baggage aboard the ship was dropping too fast. Pilot Dinsmore had glided into the choppy sea as best he could, but not without pitching overboard one of his passengers, one Peter Kanevaros of Jaffersonville, Ind. While the gentleman from Indiana was bobbing up and paddling back to the plane, Pilot Dinsmore quickly instructed his remarkably calm companions. They broke a cabin window and chopped a hole in the roof. They took posts on the broad wings and fuselage as they were told, distributing weight as evenly as possible to help the fabric keep them afloat. They were a little scared. The ship’s heavy engines were taking her down nose first.

After 20 minutes, Thomas Marshall’s boat hove in sight, soon followed by a sister smack. The marooned ones edged warily from the sinking wings to the fuselage, from the fuselage toward the rudders. When Thomas Marshall was near enough to make himself heard he told them not to jump. They looked at shivering Mr. Kanevaros of Indiana and waited obediently until ropes were passed and they were all taken off. Pilot Dinsmore, now standing waist-deep, was the last. As the smack swung clear, the plane pulled her tail under and slid down to join the Spanish galleons, the German submarines, the Channel-swimmers’ brandy bottles.

It was the third major Paris-to-London airway accident* in six months, but with no casualties. No cause was assigned for the motor trouble save that the ship was newly built and evidently insufficiently tested.

Danube Daedalus

The Associated Press, world-wide newsgathering organization which does not employ people to make sensational blunders, last week, in a despatch from Vienna, reported a Daedalus on the Danube. One M. Lutsch, Austrian inventor, was credited with demonstrating, by a flight several yards off the ground during which he moved swiftly and in any direction at will, a pair of attachable wings and an 80-pound motor carried between the shoulders. Inventor Lutsch predicted “a certain amount of flying, in comfort and safety,” for every one, with his contrivance which, when perfected, could be retailed for about $300.

Launching

Off San Pedro, Calif., Navy flight officers accomplished the unprecedented feat of catapulting a 5,100-pound amphibian plane from the deck of a battleship, the U. S. S. West Virginia, with a blast of powder. A charge equivalent to that used in an 80-pound shell was used. Tossed forward, away from the ship, the plane gained altitude at once by its own engine power. The significance: without the great deck space provided on airplane baseships, ships of war qr peace may be equipped with airplane auxiliaries.

*Two French airliners have crashed since August; one at Hurst, Kent, with three deaths (TIME, Aug. 30) ; one at Tonbridge, Kent, which burned, killing seven.