Flights & Flyers

Consul-General-- Year ago Alden Freeman, 69, wealthy & eccentric Florida philanthropist and globetrotter, announced that thereafter he would travel only by air. Last week he set out in a Moth biplane from Kingston, Jamaica to Port-au-Prince, Haiti to visit his good friend Lieut. Faustin E. Wirkus of the Garde D'Haiti and U. S. Marines (TIME, Jan. 26). The plane was forced down midway, floated for six hours until Globe-trotter Freeman and his pilot were picked up by a steamer.

At Miami, where he maintains two of his three U. S. residences, Mr. Freeman is known as "Honorary Consul-General of Haiti." At the Bal Boheme in Washington last year he and his party enacted in tableau the discovery of Haiti, Mr. Free man impersonating Christopher Columbus in elaborate costume and shell-rimmed spectacles. He once invited Emma Gold man, radical propagandist, to lecture on Communism in his East Orange, N. J. home but the meeting was thwarted by police. In 1918 he converted his home into a hospital for wounded soldiers, cared for 1,000 in three years. Last year in Manhattan, he entertained at a large dinner Nan Britton and her ("The President's") daughter.

Job. Bernt Balchen, who flew Richard Evelyn Byrd across the Atlantic and over the South Pole, took a job last week as pilot on the Ludington Line's plane-every-hour service between New York, Philadelphia & Washington. Pilot Balchen & backers are planning a round-the-world flight.

Dive, A Royal Air Force flying boat carrying twelve men swooped in for a landing at Plymouth Sound last week. Mis judging his altitude, the pilot crashed the surface steeply at 70 m.p.h. Nine were killed.

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