Transpacific Air Services

Complete Success of Inaugural 'Frisco-Manila Flight

PIONEERING the trans-Pacific airmail service, the 25-ton flying boat, China Clipper, soared through the Golden Gate on the return from her ocean cruise to the Philippines via Hawaii, a distance of 16,000 miles, in December (says a writer in the Melbourne Herald).

This great feat was carried out without a hitch and according to schedule, which provides for a plane each way every fort night, but passengers will not be carried until the service has reached the stage of routine regularity.

Thus, within eight years of the pioneer flight across the Pacific by Kingsford Smith and Ulm, their dream of a commercial ser vice has been realised.

This great flying boat carries a crew of nine and takes 60 hours on the passage across the ocean from San Francisco to Manila. She carries two tons of mail each way.

The inauguration of this service repre sents the fruits of five years of preparatory work. Island bases, depots and landing grounds were prepared; the route was surveyed in great detail, and an elaborate system of weather stations from one side of the ocean to the other has been set up. where every slightest change in the weather map is analysed and communicated to the meteorologist in the plane by wireless.

These weather stations and radio stations keep a 24-hour watch and call up the China Clipper every 30 minutes. Thus she main tains continual contact with civilisation in her passage across the ocean.

The route outward lies via Honolulu (the first and most risky section over open ocean, with no friendly islands), Midway Island, Wake Island, Guam and thence to Manila.

Each of these are stopping places where the giant craft is re-fuelled and re-stored, and any minor repairs or overhauls made.

Directional wireless, radio compasses, four engines and a thoroughly surveyed route

with complete weather data are the safe guards of the service, which, when it was inaugurated, marked one of the greatest developments in the exploitation not only of air but of all transport and communi cation.

The fastest sea-surface time from San Francisco to Manila is at present 21 days.

The China Clipper performs the passage in 60 hours or 2J days.

Air mail from the Philippines is now delivered in Washington and New York six days after posting.

Future developments comprise an exten sion of the service to China, where Canton is the goal, and, thus, regular air mail services will operate between the Orient and America.