Transport: On to Hong Kong

Up from lush Penang Island in the Straits Settlements last week climbed a four-motored Imperial Airways airplane. For some 650 miles it sped across the Gulf of Siam to Saigon in French Indo-China, then 350 miles on to Tourane, finally another 550 miles straight across the South China Sea to Hong Kong. Thus, in the first of six trial flights, Imperial Airways Ltd. sprouted a new branch from its main stem between London and Australia. Carrying passengers and mail, the new service will run twice a week, is significant because it brings the trans-Asian airline within 80 miles of Macao, now planned as the terminus of Pan American Airways transpacific route.*

Also last week, Imperial Airways ordered the first of a new fleet of 18-ton flying boats from England’s Short Brothers Ltd. Four-motored, high-winged monoplanes with a speed of about 200 m.p.h., the new transports are expected to make actual by 1937 the program announced in Parliament last December of carrying all Great Britain’s first-class mail to & from India, Africa, Singapore and Australia by air.

*Pan American’s famed Clipper last week set a new record to Hawaii on the first leg of its first trip to Guam.