Cinema

Night flying, more & more popular on U. S. airlines, is a bore. The scenery is blackness, scattered lights, sometimes stars. Not bored, however, were nine passengers on a Washington-Pittsburgh plane of Central Airlines one night last week. Two seats had been removed to install a five-foot-square screen at the cabin's front end. Warner Brothers had provided a cinema projector, two technicians, a specially-made 16-mm. print of Devil Dogs of the Air. The tri-Wasp Ford, ordinarily noisy, had been sound-proofed with rock wool.

Although neither noise nor vibration interfered with passengers' enjoyment of the antics of James Cagney several thousand feet over the Alleghenies, Central Airlines does not plan to install cinema-chinery in its planes regularly until some manufacturer produces specially-designed equipment. First sound motion picture in the air was not Devil Dogs of the Air but Baboona, the Martin Johnson film which Eastern Air Lines showed bigwigs month ago in a Douglas a mile over Manhattan. Baboona, a regular 35-mm. film, will be shown again over Chicago this week in a TWAirliner.

The idea originated in 1929 when T. A. T. used silent pictures on a few experimental runs, then dropped the scheme when passengers proved indifferent. But those were daylight runs.

USSR's famed Maxim Gorki (ANT-20), world's largest landplane, contains a complete sound cinema projection booth in addition to a broadcasting studio, rotary printing press (capacity: 10,000 papers per hr.), photo-engraving plant, etc. But Maxim Gorki's projector is used on the ground, to show propaganda films in territory where cinemansions are unknown.

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