Transport: Crash, Crash, Crash

¶ Down upon Colorado last week swept the worst September blizzard in years, smothering Denver with 17 inches of snow, disrupting traffic throughout the State. Up from El Paso, Tex. about the same time climbed a single-motored Lockheed Vega belonging to Varney Air Transport, Inc., passenger-mail line between El Paso and Pueblo, Colo. Meeting bad weather, Pilot C. H. Chidlaw landed at Trinidad, Colo, for the night. Next morning he and his two passengers headed north again. Twenty minutes later, three ranchers near lonely Rattlesnake Buttes saw the plane circling in distress through the heavy blizzard. Apparently intending to land, Pilot Chidlaw cut his motor. Suddenly he saw the butte ahead, desperately gunned his ship in an attempt to clear it. He failed. Running to the wreck, the ranchers found “the mangled bodies of two men and a woman.”

¶ Around a bend in the track near the Naperville, Ill. Country Club last week streaked Chicago, Burlington & Quincy R. R.’s streamliner Zephyr. Down within 200 ft. above it swooped a trim red Lockheed Vega with a pilot, two commercial photographers and a script girl aboard, hired to get some shots of the silvery train to be used by C. B. & Q. for publicity. With its engine cut too low for the glide, the little monoplane was suddenly caught in the vortex of air caused by the stream-liner’s passage. Out of control, it banked sharply to the right, crashed in a gush of flame. When rescuers arrived, “the bodies were already burned beyond recognition.”

¶ In 1894 a young U. S. Jew named Isadora W. Schlesinger tired of his family’s banking business, ran away to Johannesburg, Africa, where he landed with only a few pennies in his pocket. Smart, hardworking, he set out to make his way not by mining but by servicing the miners. Beginning with insurance, he got into real estate, farming, banking, shipping, chain stores, theatres. Now 61, he is short, round-faced, roly-poly, called “the Rockefeller of South Africa” because he owns more of it than any other man. Still a U. S. citizen, he dislikes publicity, hides in a tiny office in one of his buildings where he appears every morning at 7:30. His formula for success: “Work, work, work, and more work is my fetish.”

Last May, as his share in the projected British Empire Exhibition at Johannesburg, South Africa’s Rockefeller offered $50,000 in prizes for a London-Johannesburg air race. Last week, as the Johannesburg Exhibition entered its third week, nine planes buzzed away from London after the prize money. Because of the rules, all nine started along the same route. Three presently dropped out because of minor troubles, one at Regensburg, Germany, one at Belgrade, one at Salonika, Greece. At Cairo, Flight Lieut. Tommy Rose, holder of the England-South Africa record, smashed his landing gear, withdrew. With five planes left in the race, Capt. Stanley Halse, South African War ace took the lead. Apparently sure of victory, he ran into veldt fires, lost his way, cracked up with a dislocated arm on an ant-hill in Southern Rhodesia. A similar mishap overtook another entrant at Mpulungu near Lake Tanganyika, while a third was grounded at Khartoum with piston trouble, later crashed at Gwelo, Southern Rhodesia. This left two planes in the air, one a big, twin-motored Envoy flown by Pilot Max Findlay with three companions, the second a small single-engined Percival Vega Gull flown by Pilot Charles William Anderson Scott, winner of the 1934 England-Australia air race, and Co-Pilot Giles Guthrie.

At Johannesburg the big crowd, waiting tensely for the end of the 6,150-mi. junket, burst into cheers as the Scott-Guthrie plane slid in for a landing, winner of the $20,000 first prize in 52 hr., 56 min. The celebration was suddenly stilled by the news that Pilot Findlay and one of his companions had been killed in a crash at Abercorn, near Lake Tanganyika. Capitalist Schlesinger announced that he would donate the rest of the prize money ($30,000) to the dependents of the two dead airmen.