Aeroplane Jobs
HERE, in this closely settled little isle of Britain, we cannot find a great deal of scope for the latest possibilities of the aeroplane, beyond carrying passengers -and light or precious wares to and fro between London and the West European airports. But the work of the Cochran-Patrick expedition in the jungles of Northern -Rhodesia, now making an aerial survey of 62,000 square miles of the Rhodesian-Congo Border concession, is a reminder that flying craft abroad are finding other jobs to keep them busy. The Cochran-Patrick party have got two D.H. 9 planes. An examination of the photo- graphs being taken is expected to reveal the tracts of stunted vegetation which betray the whereabouts of copper ore.
Canada appears to lead the world in the range of uses to which aeroplanes can be put. Of late the Manitoba Department of Agriculture has been feeding the ducks from planes—which looks like an extravagant amusement. But Nature's " farmyard," which it is desired to make a treacherously pleasant-seeming home for hungry sub- Arctic paddle-feet, is the Moose Lake and Cedar Lake region, believed to be the largest duck marsh in North America, and very difficult of access by ordinary means of travel. So up to Cormorant Lake station, on the Hudson Bay railway, have been sent an aeroplane, a pilot and hundreds of sacks of wild rice. Hopes are entertained that the duck will not be greedy to begin with, for the first scattering is intended to be rather in the nature of a planting of future rice crops than of a welcome banquet from the clouds, to be gobbled up there and then. Pilots of the Royal Canadian Air Force are being sent up aloft to locate the wanderings, above the clouds, of malignant spores of " rust," a dreaded wheat disease. These culprits have already been found 800 miles from the nearest cornfield and at a height of 5,000 feet. Last year, 227 forest fires were spotted from the air, in time to stop them doing much damage, fifty-six million acres of forest were covered on fire patrol, 8,335 square miles of vertical survey was accomplished and 40,000 square miles of oblique survey. A good deal of coastal smuggling was detected, too. Private enterprise, also, has been making a lot of use, in Canada, of the aeroplane, in prospecting for gold, fetching food and machinery, and taking back the precious ore. The Russians, over in Eastern Siberia, have been linking up their remotely situated goldfields in the Aldan region by ore-carrying planes that take five hours for a journey needing thirty-five days when horses are used to carry the stuff through the trackless forest. In California it is proposed to open up an other- wise inaccessible mine in the Sierra, near Visalia, in this manner.
The Americans are highly pleased with an experiment in replanting, from the air, a fire-devastated area in the island of Hawaii. Two army planes were used, and accomplished in an hour and a half a job that would have taken a couple of men on terra firma two years.
The French, after successful tests, are going to put aeroplanes on to a job of road-making this year, high up in the Alps near Mont Blanc, where the highest road in Europe is being constructed, to the Vallot Observatory, 14,312 feet above sea-level. Up and down by plane will go the workmen, their tools and the sacks of cement.
In Formosa head-hunters ambush lumbermen in the jungles. Therefore, having first spread the report that monstrous eagle-like creatures of Formosan mythology were shortly going to be sent by the gods to administer a warning and a chastisement, some shrewd minds in the Japanese Governor-General's secretariat sent a pair of these admonitory fowl over the murderers' haunts. Several explosive eggs were laid— and there has been no trouble since. During the freeze-up in the Gulf of Finland in January last year, when even the great German battleship, ' Essen,' driven by 18,000 h.p. engines, could make no headway in the endeavour to revictual the thirty-eight ships locked in the ice, the job was done by Finnish Army aeroplanes. Airmen co-operate with whalers below in discovering Leviathan out in the heaving grey wastes of the North Pacific ; and both off Labrador and in the White Sea, colonies of seals are located from the air. Norse fishermen putting out from Stavanger have successfully used aeroplanes for " spotting " shoals ; and in the Santa Catalina Archi- pelago, off the Californian coast, aero-anglers have had great sport, actually trolling from low-flying planes for tunny and swordfish.
Insect pests have ample cause to rue that fatal day when Orville Wright first achieved the impossible. In the cotton plantations of South America calcium arsenate has been scattered by aeroplane, to wipe out the destructive boll weevils. The forests of Alsace Lorraine are sprayed from the air, to kill plagues of caterpillars, as are woods near Berlin, where poison gas, too, has been used with success. In South Russia, last July, planes ranged hither and thither to scout for advancing columns of locusts, one of which was ascertained to be five miles long by three wide. After troops had made a vast ring of fire round them, and evacuated all human beings and cattle in the vicinity, the airmen at night flew low over the rest- ing hordes, spraying them with poison gas. The U.S. Bureau of Entomology has been wiping out mosquito larvae by spraying calcium arsenate powder over swampy regions of Louisiana, hitherto rendered unin- habitable by the malaria-carrying anopheles. The French, too, have sprayed a malarial district of Lorraine in this way.
The Americans have resorted to the aeroplane for making swift crop surveys, in North Carolina and else- where. Out on the Western ranches a Utah cowboy has demonstrated that he can get quicker, better and cheaper results by rounding up great herds of wild horses from the air than reward the efforts of scores of cowboys below. Spring floods in the Susquehanna valley, caused by ice jams in the gorges, are now prevented by sending up aeroplanes to bomb the obstructions.
Very few expeditions of exploration set forth nowadays without an aeroplane. The seaplane of the Dutch- American party that has just crossed Western New Guinea proved of use, not merely for scouting, transport and keeping the bases in touch with each other, but for overawing the fierce Papuan tribesmen ; when asked if they had seen the plane, they showed that they had by running up and down, arms outstretched, with great glee, like children playing a new game. The Great Barrier Reef, off Australia, is being surveyed photographically and charted, by Australian Air Force hydroplanes, and similar surveys have recently been made in the Amazon basin, the great jungle of Borneo, and the delta of the
Previous page
