Aeronautics: Odds & Ends: Jul. 20, 1931

Odds, Ends

¶Flying mail between Nanking and Berlin, a plane and two pilots of Eurasia Corp. were forced down in a storm last fortnight. Another of the company’s planes flew out to search, sighted the missing craft in the Mongolian desert. But when the rescuers glided low for a landing, a band of tribesmen shot at them, drove them up and away again. The searchers saw no sign of the stranded pilots.

¶Two months ago a flyer named Trist, onetime Royal Australian Air Force pilot, was lost in the bush near Zenang, New Guinea, while flying in the service of New Guinea Airways. A searching party of 50 natives and a white man beat their way into the region but were forced back by hostile tribesmen. Last week two natives emerged from the bush with the story that Trist’s airplane had crashed, that the pilot had struggled on foot to the nearest village, that the villagers had butchered him, eaten him at a feast.