AERONAUTICS: Big Planes

Rabelais’ jocose giant Pantagruel, under whose tongue a whole army once hid, might find the 500-ft. U. S. plane now being designed no wonder. But certainly the Arabian roc, which carried off elephants for its nestlings as an eagle rapes a mouse, would shy from the monstrous thing U. S. engineers propose to build for $5,000,000. Who the financiers are, who the builders, was kept secret. That it was a bona fide project Harry Westcott of Westcott & Mapes, Inc., New Haven and Manhattan engineering firm, testified immediately after Governor John H. Trumbull of Connecticut had predicted such a ship at a dinner of New Haven’s august Union League Club. Westcott & Mapes are now estimating their bids on the structural work of not one, but two such planes. The builders expect that the first will be wrecked by the ineptitude of navigators with such a mighty machine. The lessons they learn in wrecking the first plane they can apply to flying the second. Each will have at least a dozen 1,000-h. p. motors, will be able to carry 500 passengers, 104 crew. Aerodynamic calculations suggest that they should be able to fly so high, so powerfully that reduced wind resistance will enable them to flit between Manhattan and London in six hours.

To these stupendities the present “biggest” planes alreadysuccessfully flown are as hawks to eagles. They were designed by Claude Dornier,* Hugo Junkers, Adolph Rohrbach and Gianni Caproni respectively. (A German engineer, probably one of the three aforementioned, is the consultant on motive power for the U. S. ships.) Measurements of their “biggests”:

WING-LENGTH TOTAL

SPAN, FT. FT. MOTORS H. P.

Dornier 160 130 12 6,300

Caproni 155 90 6 6,000

Junkers 148 75 4 2,400

Rohrbach 121 72 3 2,250

These ships, designers hope, will be able to make regular transoceanic trips. Biggest U. S. seaplane is Major Reuben Hollis Fleet’s Consolidated Commodore: span 100 ft., length 62 ft., 2 motors, 1,050 h. p. Biggest U. S. land plane is Anthony Herman Gerard Fokker’s F-32, span 99 ft., length 70 ft., 4 motors, 2,100 h. p. These have just been tried out and sold for South American passenger service.

Bigger than any of these is the flying boat which Germany’s Edmund Rumpler says he is designing. It is to have 10 motors with 10,000 h. p. capacity, accommodations for 135 passengers and 35 crew.

*He sailed last week to attend a Manhattan meeting of the board of directors of Dornier Motors Aircraft Corp. of America, which General Motors Corp. recently formed to make his big seaplanes in the U. S. (TIME, Nov. 4).