Flights & Flyers

Playing Safe. At the end of the week in which Jimmie Mattern airily promised to circle the earth from and to Floyd Bennett Field, N. Y. (TIME, June 12) he was in Khabarovsk. Far Eastern Siberia, so utterly exhausted by a grueling flight across sea and land that he could not even answer newsmen. With all chance gone of beating the 8 1/2-day globe record of Post & Gatty he now was trying to make the best possible solo record, yet heeding the cabled exhortations of his backers to "take it easy and play it safe." Sorriest mishap of Mattern's flight across the steppes occurred east of Omsk when a fuel line in his Lockheed plane broke. Dizzy and nauseated from breathing gas fumes. Pilot Mattern set his ship down at the coal mining settlement of Belovo, so groggily that it cracked the stabilizer. He lost a day and a half there before mechanics, flown from Novosibirsk, completed repairs. For the treacherous 2,600-mi. hop from Khabarovsk across the Sea of Okhotsk, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Bering Sea to Nome. Pilot Mattern steeled himself with plenty of rest.

Cuatro Vientos (''Four Winds") is the name of the military airport near Madrid where, three years ago, Major Ramon Franco (''The Spanish Lindbergh") led a dramatic but abortive revolt by 500 Spanish aviation officers and enlisted men. One of Major Franco's followers was Lieut. Joaquin Collar. Last week at Tablada Airdrome, near Seville, Lieut. Collar and Captain Mariano Barberan, bald-pated air hero of the Moroccan war, climbed into a long-snouted Breguet biplane named Cuatro Vientos. Lumbering beneath an enormous fuel load (1,400 gal.) the plane took more than a half-mile run to get off. In an hour it was over the ocean. For a day, a night, and another day the plane roared westward across the Atlantic like a perfectly aimed projectile to the eastern tip of Cuba, settled down at Camaguey, flew on to Havana. The nonstop distance over water, 4,500 mi., was second only to Herndon & Pangborn's record from Japan to the U. S. (4,800 mi.).

"Last Flight." A late afternoon breeze blew suddenly in from squally Lake Michigan, whipping up violent swells in front of the seaplane ramp at the Chicago World's Fair. Said an employe of the airplane sightseeing service to the pilot: "Do you think it's safe for landings?" Replied Pilot Carl Vickery: ''I'll try one last flight." Seven or eight men & women passengers (no one was positive of the exact number afterward) piled into the Sikorsky amphibian and off they went. Twenty minutes later the ship glided to a landing. Crack! A slapping wave broke the starboard pontoon. Rather than taxi through the swells with his right wingtip boring the water, Pilot Vickery gunned his engines, took off for the landing field near Glenview north of the city. A mile short of that goal the weakened right wing crumpled. The plane crashed in a plowed field. Pilots, passengers, all were cremated.

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