Sailing Storm Trooper

From a hillside near Konigsberg, East Prussia one morning last week a group of university students launched into the air a small sailplane named Loerzer of Grunau. In the cockpit sat a brown-shirted youth named Kurt Schmidt, 27, a philology student at Konigsberg and a Nazi Storm Trooper. It was a good day for a sail--fresh breezes were blowing--and Student Schmidt thought he might stay up until afternoon, so he carried a bottle of drinking water, a few slices of black bread. He sailed south along a ridge 40 mi. or so, swinging back & forth to catch the up-currents that gave altitude, wheeled around and headed home again. Dusk fell, but breezes continued fresh. Student Schmidt thought he might as well keep on sailing. Idly he thought about endurance records. The German record was 16 1/2 hr.; but a U. S. Army officer, Lieut. William A. Cocke Jr., had sailed for 21 1/2 hr. over Honolulu two years ago. . . . Kurt Schmidt swung along the ridge again, soared silently through the darkness. His friends on the ground, catching the idea, flashed weather signals to him with a pocket flashlight. Midnight passed, dawn broke, the sun touched meridian. Kurt Schmidt, tired and hungry, sailed on & on. A second dusk brought threats of a storm. Schmidt and the Loerzer landed with a duration record of 36 1/2 hr.

5,700 Mi.

Paul Codos, a big, swarthy Frenchman who has had a 15-year career of spectacular flying, sniffed the wind at Floyd Bennett Field one dawn last week. He glanced toward the head of the runway where mechanics were fuelling a huge Bleriot monoplane named for the late, famed Joseph LeBrix. He glanced toward the far end where two fire trucks, a crash wagon and an ambulance waited ominously. Grinning, he muttered "Eh, Bien." Then he and another seasoned French pilot named Maurice Rossi kissed their weeping mechanics goodbye, kissed the astonished field manager, climbed into the Joseph LeBrix. No one at Floyd Bennett Field had ever seen such a takeoff. With the unheard-of load of 1,770 gal. of gasoline, the plane weighed nine tons. Cool-headed Pilot Codos held her to nearly the end of the mile-long runway, then eased her into a gentle climb--100 ft. altitude in about three miles. They were off into the east, to what destination even they knew not. Their sole objective: to fly as far as possible, perhaps to India, to break the 5,130 mi. nonstop record held by Great Britain. Through that day and night and the next day the Joseph LeBrix, sturdy but slow, plodded across the Atlantic. Storms battered her. but visibility meant little to her pilots; they were flying by instrument and by radio. On the second evening they swooped low-over Le Bourget (nine minutes behind Lindbergh's time), dropped messages to their wives who. waving and shrieking hysterically, could plainly see their men's faces. Codos & Rossi" flew on through the night and the third day, across Central Europe, Greece and the Aegean Sea. They skirted the coast of Asia Minor. A gasoline leak, wicked winds, intense heat and fatigue combined to make them choose a landing spot. Escorted by French Army Planes the Joseph LeBrix landed at Rayack near the Syrian seaport of Beirut. Unofficial distance from New York: 5,700 mi.

France's Answer

If General Italo Balbo's 24 seaplanes had been not Italian but Japanese; if they had flown not across the Atlantic but eastward across the Pacific; if they had landed for a --goodwill" visit not at Chicago's lakefront but in Seattle's Puget Sound -- they would have received a punctiliously polite welcome. But the average U. S. citizen would have felt about the same as the average Frenchman felt last month when Balbo's armada came roaring across the Alps out of Italy to blacken the skies of France. Last week France's Air Ministry an nounced a program to reassure her uneasy citizens. The French air force will stage a mass flight of its own. Twenty-two bombers will set out in October from Istres Airdrome in southern France. They will cross the Mediterranean to the west coast of Morocco, fly down the coast to the shoulder of Senegal, thence inland across the French Sudan, nearly to the Congo. Finally, north over the Sahara to the Mediterranean again, and home -- 15,600 mi. in all. Volunteer officers & crew were called to begin training, at Istres. Like Balbo's men, they will be held strictly incommunicado until time to take off. Air Minister Pierre Cot, who only lately learned to fly, will not try to imitate Air Minister Balbo by leading the squadrons himself. General Joseph Vuillemin, chief of the air force in Morocco, will command. Weatherbound at Shoal Harbor on Trinity Bay, N. F. General Balbo announced last week that instead of following the North Atlantic route home via Ireland, he would head for the Azores and Lisbon.

Settle Down

A big moment at every fair is the grand balloon ascension. One night last week at the world's greatest fair. 40,000 persons crowded into Chicago's Soldier Field to see what promised to be the greatest balloon ascension ever made--a flight to the stratosphere by Lieut.-Commander Thomas G. W. ("Tex") Settle. Ceremonies lasted seven hours. Soldiers and sailors paraded the field. Massed bands countermarched. Radio loudspeakers brought from Manhattan the voice of Professor Arthur Holly Compton. scientific director of the flight, wishing Commander Settle luck in breaking Auguste Piccard's 10-mi. altitude record and in gathering data on cosmic and ultraviolet rays. A major-general had the honor of starting the hydrogen gas hissing into the acre of white rubberized bag--biggest ever built. An admiral saw to the hooking on of the spherical gondola made of metal 1/8-in. thick. Mrs. Rufus Cutler Dawes, wife of the president of the Fair, dashed a bottle of liquid air on the gondola, christened it Century of Progress. Colors were piped. Bands blared "Anchors Aweigh." Commander Settle climbed into the gondola, waved, sealed himself in, and was off into the moonlit sky. Searchlights fingered the balloon as it floated up and westward over the Loop. After ten minutes it ceased to rise. Then it began to fall. Down, down it came, skimming the sheds in the Burlington & Quincy Railroad yards at 14th & Canal Streets. Plunk!--it landed on the tracks, barely missing the head of a yardman and scaring him out of his wits. In a few minutes a crowd of thousands jammed the yards. "Get those cigarets away!" shouted Commander Settle, who had pulled the ripcord to empty the bag of hydrogen. Except for a dent in the gondola the balloon and instruments were intact. Sadly Commander Settle explained the fiasco: planning to hang at 5,000 ft. until dawn, he had pulled his gas escape valve. The valve stuck open. Then it was recalled that during the last-minute fanfare the valve had been opened & closed several times while those near the balloon listened for escaping gas. Commander Settle later admitted that he was not quite positive the valve was completely closed as he took off, but was unwilling to spoil the show with further delay. The Chicago Daily News, which had financed and ballyhooed the flight (with the Exposition and National Broadcasting Co.) refused to admit defeat. Stubbornly it boasted: "A balloon flight that ended as brilliantly as it began gave Chicago one of its greatest thrills. The climax was the unexpected. Settle did not reach the stratosphere as he had planned. But he did something more--a thing that will be imperishable in the history of ballooning. He landed the biggest balloon ever built in the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world in darkness, and landed it perfectly. . . ."

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