Transport: Transatlantic

For the comparatively few people in the U. S. who are in a hurry to fly across the Atlantic, this will be a tantalizing summer. Last week the upper component of the British Short-Mayo Composite, the seaplane Mercury (“The piggyback plane”), arrived in Foynes, Eire, after an uneventful round trip to Canada and the U. S. And last week off City Island, N. Y., the Lufthansa Nordmeer, flicked like a bug from the deck of its catapult ship, the Friesenland, skittered across to the Azores just after its colleague, the Nordwind, had skittered from the Azores to Port Washington, Long Island. Howard Hughes and Douglas Corrigan having completed (TIME, July 25) their spectacular flights with a maximum of uproar, the commercial airlines of three nations were quietly getting down to the business of flying the Atlantic. The New York World-Telegram, one day when no transatlantic plane was in the air, printed a facetious front-page headline: U. S. VIRTUALLY CUT OFF FROM EUROPE FOR DAY.

The Germans are the most impatient to get North Atlantic planes into regular service. Every week since 1934 Deutsche Lufthansa has been flying mail in fast Heinkel He. 705 from Berlin to Bathurst on the bulging coast of Africa, thence in Dornier DO-18s across the narrow South Atlantic to where South America bulges out to meet them at Natal, Brazil. Lufthansa one day will carry passengers on this route; until last year, when the Hindenburg burned up at Lakehurst, N. J., passengers could make the crossing any fortnight by Zeppelin.

For three years Lufthansa pilots have flown the North Atlantic as cool as cream: they made eight flights in 1936, 14 in 1937, and this year they will make 28, two a week, with the Nordmeer, Nordwind and Nordstern, all Hamburg Ha. 1395 with four Diesel engines, a catapult start, and a payload of only 880 Ib. Lufthansa would like to start flying mail any day now, but it has been allowed to use Pan American’s sea base at Port Washington only if it waits till Pan American can match it flight for flight.

The French have also flown mail for years across the South Atlantic. For the last year the experimental S. S. Carimare has been dawdling in the middle of the ocean collecting weather information; for the first time Air France Transatlantique (combination of Air France and Compagnie Generale Transatlantique) is on the point of sending planes across the North Atlantic. This month and next, the hulking, 40-ton, six-motored Latecoere Lt. de Vaisseau Paris will make half-a-dozen round trips.

The English have no notion of using piggyback planes in regular transatlantic service; last week’s flight of the Mercury was a simple military experiment. Nonetheless, the Mercury will twice more shuttle across the Atlantic from Foynes to Montreal and Port Washington. More serious items on Imperial Airways’ transatlantic schedule: five flights by the De Havilland four-motor Albatross, four flights by the Cabot, a seaplane of the same genus as the Caledonia and the Cambria which made ten flights in 1937.

Pan American has flown some 60,000,000 miles above water—3,000,000 across the Pacific, a considerably more arduous trip (see p. 44) than across the Atlantic. While its rivals are out practicing it thinks it can relax till Boeing finishes the first of six 72-passenger Clippers (biggest transport planes in the world) in Seattle, Wash. Unlike the English Composites and the German Catapults, the Pan American Clipper will heave itself out of the water on its own power. But until it or some other U. S. plane is ready to start a regular schedule, no mail, no passengers, will be flown across the North Atlantic by anyone else.