Notes

Queer Birds. On Long Island, disaster came last week to two queer mechanical birds. At Curtiss Field, the Sellars four-winged plane, weighing only 150 pounds, burst into flames when its tiny two-cylinder engine backfired, ignited some gasoline on the cockpit floor. Test Pilot Frank Cordova escaped with his life, even though his hair

and his shoes caught on fire

At Roosevelt Field, the "Flying Doughnut," a plane with four circular wings, invented by Dr. George Francis Myers, collapsed on the runway of its maiden voyage. Reason: the doughnut wings became disconnected from the fuselage. . . .

Champion's Dive. Lieut. Carlton G. Champion of the U. S. Navy was 36,000 feet (about seven miles) above the earth in a Wright Apache biplane last week, when his Pratt & Whitney "Wasp" engine exploded. Seven of the nine piston rods shot out, ripping holes in the plane's wings, knocking the oxygen tube out of Lieutenant Champion's mouth. His goggles were frosted so that he could hardly see, but he volplaned (dived in great circles) toward the earth, made a successful landing in a corn field, near Boiling Field, Washington, D. C. Said he: "I fell like a bat out of hell." On the flight he wore several suits of silk underwear, a woolen suit, a featherlined jacket, a fur-lined leather flying suit--all of which had been put on ice to prevent him from smothering before he reached the freezing upper air. Going up, he disappeared from sight in ten minutes. Readings of his barographs showed that he reached a height of 39,000 feet, failed to shatter the world's altitude record of 40,820 feet. Black Returns. Few men have more effectively demonstrated that flying is both safe and pleasant than Van Lear Black, chairman of the board of the Baltimore Sun. He returned last week in a Fokker monoplane to Amsterdam, Holland, having completed -a leisurely 39-day round-trip to the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies. Accompanied by his valet and two Dutch pilots, Mr. Black flew nearly 20,000 miles,* paused at such places as Budapest, Constantinople, Aleppo, Bagdad, Bunder Abhas, Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia. Cigar Store. It became known last week that the U. S. Government had issued its first airplane peddler's license to the United Cigar Stores Co., in order to legalize that company's "flying cigar store" now hopping about the land in the form of a Sikorsky biplane (TIME, July 18). Roller Coaster. Inventor C. Francis Jenkins of Washington, D. C., has been devoting himself to the problem of launching and landing airplanes in as little space as possible. A fortnight ago, he announced the reversible propeller which, he hopes, will be an effective "air brake" when a plane lands (TIME, July 25). Last week, he announced a launching runway, resembling a roller coaster. A plane, with its engine roaring, would be released at the top of this runway, 32 feet high. The pull of gravity and of the engine would send the plane down the incline in a natural nose dive, while guard rails hold the wheels and tail-skid in place. On the lower part of the incline, when the plane has gained twice the necessary flying speed, the tail-skid channel is depressed below the level of the front wheels, the guard rails end, the take-off is automatic. Inventor Jenkins believes this runway can be built for less than $10,000.

* It is only 24,896 miles around the world at the equator.