[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—I have read with
interest the letters by Mr. Norman Thwaites and Commander C. D. Burney in your pages of October 1st. Mr. Thwaites does not deal with any practical point, except by stating in error that there are commercial aviation services which pay their way, and by confusing steamship subsidies with the wholly different aviation subsi- dies ; I hope he will pardon me, therefore, if I devote my rejoinder to Commander Burney.
We owe much to Commander Burney, the inventor of the paravane, which saved so many gallant seamen in the War. He is an ingenious and accomplished man, and I note with pleasure that he does not encourage the wanton waste of human life in attempts to fly the Atlantic. It is unfortunate, however, that Commander Burney, in a whole page of your space, has so little to say about the methods by which it is proposed, in the two airships now building at enormous cost to the British tax-payer, to avoid the fatal weakness which doomed the ' Shenandoah.
When I wrote my letter which appeared in your issue of September 25th I had not read the paper entitled, "The Case Against the Airship," which was read by Mr. E. F. Spanner to the Institute of Marine Engineers on September 20th. I wish that every intelligent person could read it. No attempt has been made to reply to Mr. Spanner, and I am not surprised, . .for his case appears to be unanswerable.
As Commander Burney has been kind enough to bring his new airship into the open, I respectfully invite him to tell us what is being done in actual engineering to meet the strong criticisms of an expert engineer. Of what are the new gas-bags and the outer covering made, and how long are they expected to endure ? What weight of aluminium alloy is it possible to use, and how is it employed to resist such vertical pressures as destroyed the ' Shenandoah '—storms which, as the official report on that disaster admitted, could not be foreseen or avoided. I invite Commander Burney to tell us plainly what is the thickness of the various members of the frame of his new airship, and their disposition. And is it not true, and must it not remain true, that when you lift lives into the air by framed-up gas-bags, the amount of metal you can put into the structure is so absurdly small that a decent margin of safety is impossible ?
I beg the public, and the editors of the public's newspapers, not to be deceived in this matter by jargon or by pseudo- scientific utterances. There is nothing in this matter which cannot be understood by an average intelligent man, and that is why I want the cards put on the table. This gas-bag business is no mystery ; the only mystery is : what, between a little less and a little more, is being done with skinny bits of aluminium and big gas-bags, at public expense, for the eventual killing of some of our fellow-subjects who really ought to be kept alive ?
I believe that Mr. Spanner's trouncing of the airship will le printed in the journal of the Institute of Marine Engineers, and I beg every interested reader of your columns to order a copy at once.
I ask leave, in conclusion, to give one quotation from Mr, Spanner's paper :- " (2) Limitations of weight make it essential so to select and dispose the material of the structural members of an airship, that Quite small faults in workmanship, minor damage in operation, or
slight corrosion are mischances any one of which is likely to cause sudden and complete failure of the whole structure. Without, at the moment, enlarging fully on this point I would remark that much of the material which was used in the construction of the R. 33, for instance, was less than 1-50th of an inch in thickness, while the thickness of the most robust of-the sections extensively used did not exceed 1-10th of an inch. These are figures which-are astounding, yet a little reflection shows that, even when so light and strong a material as-nuralumin (mainly alutninium) is used, the total Weight available for the whole of the metal framework of an airship is so little that the thickness of any element must be extremely small. In the case of a certain airship, 550. feet long by 70 feet diameter, the whole of the duralumin framework, including main and intermediate transverse girders and also main and intermediate longitudinals, did not, I believe, exceed 7 tons."
What is the answer ?—I am, Sir, &e.,
LEO CRIOZZA MONEY.
P.S.—Since writing the above I have read Mr. Whiston's astonishing letter in your issue of October 8th. The fact that I have flown in an aeroplane in circumstances far more interesting and hazardous than Mr. Whiston is ever likely to encounter has no more to do with the argument than the fact that Mr. Whiston appears to have flown at the expense of the tax-payers of several nations. As to being afraid, every decent-minded man ought to be afraid of exposing other people's lives to unnecessary risks, and I think that -the hushing-up of air disasters amounts to a scandal.
Since writing my letter there have been many dreadful civilian air disasters in Germany and America, but only one of them has been reported here, and that only because it killed a well-known ambassador. I also think it a crying scandal that people are not made, by proper information, to. realize that the Air Ministries of the world are preparing the most dreadful assault ever made upon white civilization, and I am one of those who think that civilization is worth preservation. Finally, as Mr. , piston begs us to be " air- minded," I respectfully suggest that every endeavour should be made to prevent the access of air to the cerebral hemi-
spheres. L. C. M. [We disagree with Sir Leo, but our reasons cannot be developed in a footnote.—En. Spectator.]
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