AERONAUTICS: Performances

Aeronautical experts regarded as significant three recent performances.

Diesel. Near Utica, Mich., last week, Packard Motor Co. successfully tested the first Diesel type engine to be used in an aircraft, declared that the oil burning motor increased efficiency 25%, banished danger of fire from gasoline, eliminated electric ignition systems, carburetors, spark plugs, other nuisances.

Fool Proof. Conspicuous among the hundreds of planes at the National Aeronautical Exposition at Mines Field, Los Angeles, was a stubby little contraption which the curious observed had no horizontal stabilizer, but a “stagger” so pronounced that the lower wing itself was almost in the position of a stabilizer. It also had the eccentricity of a decolage, or angle of the lower wing in relation to ‘the upper wing, and a pilot’s seat placed back against the tail. Questions addressed to a nervous, alert, bearded little man, seldom far away, brought vociferous response supplemented by rapid curves and graphs sketched upon a pad always in hand, to prove the qualities of stability possessed by this unique craft. Having completed the professoriat demonstration Prof. A. A. Merril of the Daniel Guggenheim Graduate School of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena) would climb into his “Flying Pickle” and proceed to demonstrate that his invention could range in speed from 45 to 105 miles per hour, take off, land, climb, descend, balance itself, without the pilot so much as touching the controls.

Autogyro. A queer looking contrivance appeared above the Paris field Le Bourget last week, descended almost vertically, fluttered gently, birdlike, to the cement take-off before the hangars, came to a dead stop within a few yards, just as a Paris-London passenger plane thundered down a 500-yard take-off for an unpremeditated, complimentary contrast. “Bravo! bravo!” shouted the crowd, which closed in upon this curiosity. Thirty-year-old, blond, Spanish inventor Juan de la Cierva explained that though he had experimented with airplanes since he was 15, it was the first time he had ever made a long cross country flight in any type of plane. Yes, he had flown from London. No, his plane was, not strictly speaking, a heliocopter. Two small wings projected from it, and it had a propeller, but the huge four bladed pinwheel surmounting the fuselage, deriving power not directly from the motor but from the forward motion of the plane, gave five times the lift of the conventional propeller. This device permitted almost vertical ascent or descent. It also increased immunity from the dangers of motor trouble over unlevel country.

Said the New York Evening Post, “Take the fuselage of an ordinary airplane, stick into its sides a pair of garden spades, with the handles into the plane; put on the nose a propeller slightly smaller than the ordinary airplane propeller, and you have the autogyro, except for the pinwheel.”

The fact that de la Cierva’s autogyro crashed a few days later due to the breaking of a cable, detracted nothing from its essential merit. Inventor and passenger escaped with bruises, owed their lives to the pinwheel which had checked the fall.

Balloon. Near the Spanish village Laravaca, last week, the basket of a balloon was found; in it the dead body of a man, Major Benito Molas. He was not injured. He had simply flown too high died from cerebral and pulmonary congestion when his respiration tube ceased to function properly. The barometer indicated that 35,750 feet had been reached.

Round the World. Of the three round-the-world air tours (TIME, Sept. 24) one ended abruptly; the others continued happily. George H. Storck wrecked his plane at Marseilles. The Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Sibour lingered over Spanish scenery. Baron Ehrenfried Gunther von Huenfeld, famed east-to-west ocean flyer, last week left Berlin with Karl Lmder, Swedish pilot, and Paul Lenderich Lufthansa mechanic, in a Junkers plane the Europa, for a world-circling tour: successfully negotiated Bulgaria, Turkey, Irak, the first few legs.