TO AUSTRALIA BY AIR.
THE late Sir Ross Smith had completed before his death an admirably clear and vivacious account of his aerial voyage to Australia, now published under the title of Fourteen Thousand Miles Through the Air (Macmillan, 10s. 6d. net). He left London on November 12th, 1919, reached Port Darwin on the following December 10th, and thence by easy stages flew to Sydney and Adelaide. His machine was a Vickers-Vimy bomber, similar to that in which Sir John Alcock flew across the Atlantic. It had two Rolls-Royce engines, each of 360 horse-power, with a wing- spread of 67 feet, and its total weight, when loaded, was six and a-half tons. Sir Ross Smith had with him his brother, Sir Keith Smith, trained like himself in the Australian Air Force during the War, and two expert Australian air-mechanics, Sergeants Bennett and Shiers. In order to gain the prize of £10,000 offered by the Commonwealth for the first airman to fly from England to Australia, Sir Ross Smith had to complete the journey within thirty days. He started in the worst possible weather, and reached Lyons on the first day, going thence by Pisa, Rome, Taranto and Canea to Egypt, and thence by Damascus to Basra, down the Gulf to Bander Abbas, Karachi, Delhi, Calcutta. Up to that point the journey had presented no great difficulties to a skilled pilot in a good machine, for at each landing-place there was an aerodrome, usually with a well-qualified staff. From Calcutta onwards the author had to land on race-courses, as at Rangoon, or on small new aerodromes, as in the Dutch East Indies, which had been prepared for his coming. If he had been forced by an accident to land at any • Christian Life, Faith, and Thought : being the First Part of the P'rionde Boole of Discipline. London : The Friends' Bookshop, 140 Blahopsuate, 111.0. Ds.]
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intervening place, he could hardly have escaped disaster. His description, for instance, of the flight from Rangoon to Bangkok over rough mountains and unexplored forest is uncommonly vivid. He could not fly low because he had to pass the hills, and when he climbed above 4,000 feet he found himself in dense cloud rising beyond the maximum height to which the machine could ascend. Then the machine began to slip sideways, and could only be righted with an effort. A single mistake on his part would have meant death to the whole party. The first landing-place beyond Bangkok turned out to be a patch of clearing, half of which was under water while the rest was dotted with tree-stumps. At Singapore, again, the race-course was far too small for an aerodrome, and the " Vimy " narrowly escaped collision with the surrounding trees as she rose at an alarmingly steep angle. At Surabaya, in Java, the landing-place was a newly reclaimed foreshore, in the mud of which the heavy machine was embedded. The field had to be carpeted with bamboo mats, torn from the native huts, for the space of three hundred yards, so that the " Vimy " could get a. pre- liminary run before rising. Three more laps, each over 400 miles long, brought the adventurers safely to Port Darwin, on the north coast of Australia. The actual flying-time to that point was 135 hours. The book shows that much has yet to be done, in providing suitable aerodromes at frequent intervals, before regular flights to Australia will be possible without serious risk. Sir Ross Smith and his comrades owed their success first to the excellence of the Vickers machine, and secondly to the care which they took at every landing in adjusting the engines, repairing damages, and especially in filling the petrol tanks with filtered- spirit--a task which took hours. The least mishap, at any rate in the journey from Calcutta onwards, would have been fatal. The book is admirably illustrated with air-photo- graphs of the chief places that were passed over, such as the Pyramids, Damascus—with the clearly marked " street that is called straight "—and Sydney Heads.
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