Transport: Ferdie’s Flight

Nearly ten miles over England in the stratosphere, where the sky is almost black and the sunlight so dazzling that it hurts to look down, a big Bristol monoplane wheeled slowly last week, dragged by its straining, special Pegasus engine. Presently, satisfied that he had broken the world’s airplane altitude record and could get no higher, the lone pilot in the enclosed cockpit started down. Near exhaustion from the height, he began getting dizzy as the plane dived toward normal air, suddenly realized that not enough oxygen was flowing into his air-tight suit, that he was about to suffocate. Frantically he tried to open the zipper of his suit and the window of his plane. Failing, he used the last remnant of his strength to snatch a knife from the wall, slit open his helmet, gulp the air that rushed in.

The flyer who thus narrowly avoided death was Squadron Leader F. D. R. (“Ferdie”) Swain, 33-year-old Royal Air Force test pilot. A voluble, keen-faced bachelor, he entered the R. A. F. in 1922, served in Ismailia, Heliopolis, commanded a test flight in Africa during which he crashed in the bush, was provisioned by parachute and rescued by a special safari. Last June he was appointed to a crack experimental group at Farnborough. In his flight last week he carried a silver figurine of St. Christopher as mascot, relished his narrow squeak, as he explained afterward, because “flying is the only thing that promises excitement, thrills and speed.” When officials calibrated his instruments, they found that he had climbed to 49,967 ft., well above both the recognized world record of 47,352 ft. set by Italy’s Renato Donati in 1934 and the unofficial mark of 48,662 ft. set by France’s Georges Detre last month.