AERONAUTICS: Uphill Route

Dallas, Tex., great distributing centre, prides itself as “the Eastern city ofthe South.” It boasts its 19 golf courses, its 28-story Magnolia building, its (oil-burning) spotlessness. But it was none of those things that put Dallas on the front page of every newspaper in the U. S. last week; it was Orbit chewing gum.

William E. Easterwood Jr. (colonel on Governor Dan Moody’s staff) inherited wealth from his banker-father, made millions more from the southwest sales agency for Orbit gum. The Orbit business was bought by William Wrigley Jr., who continues to distribute it through the Easterwood agency. Touring Europe this summer with his wife, rich Col. Easterwood, publicity-loving, met Dieudonné Coste and Maurice Bellonte, offered them $25,000 if they would continue their Paris-New York flight to Dallas. According to one account, Col. Easterwood gave $75,000 to finance the entire trans-Atlantic flight, one-third of the sum to be given the flyers clear.

Down and into Dallas’s Love field, busiest airport of the southwest, slipped Coste’s red sesquiplane “Point d’lnterrogation” last week at the end of a 1,700-mi. flight from New York. The mob of 20,000 rushed the lines of police and national guardsmen with as much mad enthusiasm as though the plane had flown direct from Paris. At length a wedge of guards forced a lane to the Southern Air Transport administration building where Mayor J. Waddy Tate and Attorney Cullen F. Thomas (for Governor Moody) offered the visitors the freedom of Dallas.

Taken to the Adolphus Hotel (owned by Adolphus Busch, grandson of the famed brewer) Capt. Coste mingled tact with candor in writing of his cross-country flight for the New York Times: “It was not hard—pouf, pouf, it was nothing at all! . . . I do not think anyone ever made $25,000 more easily. . . . The reception we received here was marvelous! Never has anyone so generously . . . greeted us, not even in New York. . . . I wish to give thanks to these Dallas people—’tres gentil.’ “*

Their prize money earned, Flyers Coste & Bellonte flew away from Dallas next morning, stopped overnight in Louisville, flew on again to Manhattan. . . .

The Flight. The unprecedented precautions taken by Coste & Bellonte brought their reward. Although heavy fog beset the Question Mark along the French coast and also off Newfoundland, weather conditions on the whole were more advantageous for flight than any time earlier in the year, or since their arrival in the U. S. By a somewhat circuitous route most of the bad spots were avoided until near Newfoundland when fog forced the flyers to climb to 3,000 ft. Their closest call Capt. Coste described in the New York Times. Hugging the coast of Nova Scotia so as not to lose sight of land, they flew beneath lowhanging rain clouds: “. . . We flew on, skirting a precipice. Suddenly there loomed up out of the mist another precipice on our port side. We were caught between the steep banks of a river. . . . It was a tight place. Bellonte was at the controls and he had to think fast. Fortunately, having flown thousands of miles, the ship was light. Bellonte gave her the gas and shot upward.”

Their battle practically won, the flyers found little thrill in the flight down the coast until the outlines of Long Island crept over the horizon. Then came the full joy of triumph. They landed at Curtiss-Wright Airport, first to make the flight that had cost the lives of ten before them, beginning with their countrymen Charles Nungesser and François Coli. Among the first to congratulate Coste & Bellonte in the wild crowd of 10,000 that swept over the field and stormed their hangar refuge was Charles Augustus Lindbergh.

Coste v. Lindbergh. In everyone’s mind last week was a comparison of the two feats—Lindbergh’s & Coste’s. Lindbergh, alone in a Ryan monoplane powered by a 200 h. p. Wright Whirlwind motor, without radio, flew eastward 3,610 mi. in 33 hr. 29 min. His fuel load was 425 gal., his average speed 107 m. p. h. An earth inductor compass, a magnetic compass on the conventional instrument board and maps were his navigating facilities. The westward flight, as every layman knows, is immeasurably more difficult largely because of prevailing headwinds. The Question Mark, radio equipped, had a 650 h. p. Hispano-Suiza motor and a top speed close to 160 m. p. h. Its instrument panel, with more than 30 dials including the invaluable “artificial horizon,” offered practically every known aid to navigation. Yet even with weather conditions unusually good, with tail winds for much of the way, with such crack airmen as Coste & Bellonte at the controls, the Question Mark was forced to fly 4,100 mi. at an average speed of 109 m. p. h. Its flying time was 37 hr. 18 min. Neither plane could have carried a payload but shrewd Capt. Coste earned reputedly $25,000 by bringing a Paris dress model for the John Wanamaker store and a number of Paris advertisements for the New York Times.

Of prominent U. S. airmen only one publicly questioned the value of the Coste flight. Said Capt. Frank Monroe Hawks: “It was a great display of nerve but a foolish thing to do. . . . Though it was magnificently courageous, flights across the ocean in landships prove nothing except nerve and luck. When one is made in a seaplane, then something will have been accomplished.”

Hero v. Hero. In contrast to the obscurity that was Lindbergh’s prior to May 1927, “Doudou” Coste was France’s idol of the air long before he started his latest flight. By the same token, perhaps, France was not quite so delirious with astonished rejoicing over Coste’s success as it had been upon Lindbergh’s dramatic landing at Le Bourget. A veteran War flyer, 38 years old, with six world records in flying already to his credit, Coste had instilled some of his own confidence into his people. They knew and shared his own maxim: “If I thought I could not do it, I would not start.”

* With less tact if not more candor Capt. Coste had said the preceding day in Manhattan: “Dallas? To me it is $25,000. . . . No! No! I don’t mean that. I wish very much to fly to Dallas.”