Airmails Across
pp. 39-40 · Read in the full issue
N. Pacific
Mystery of "Hawaii Clipper's"
Disappearance
From Our Own Correspondent.
Honolulu, Aug. 20.
THERE are interesting angles to the disappearance of the trans-Pacific airboat “Hawaii Clipper”, with 15 lives, on July 28. while on a routine flight from Guam to Manila.
The last radio message from the clipper has given rise to much speculation. It read: “Temperature 13 degrees centigrade.
Altitude 9,100 feet. Nineteen knots wind.
Rough air. Ground speed 112 knots. Rain.
Ten stratus cumulus at 9,200 feet. Ten cumulus at 7,000 feet.”
These routine words are packed with meaning to aviators and aerologists, especially the last two sentences. The figure 10 used in regard to clouds means that the entire area of the sky was obs cured. The figure 1 would mean that one-tenth of the sky was covered; 2, that two-tenths was, and so on.
The clipper, then, was flying between two layers of clouds.
Walter Feldwisch, U.S. weather observer at Honolulu, said: “Thunder heads are al ways likely to develop under such condi tions, especially in the area where the plane was flying. They come up very quickly.”
Veteran Pacific pilots lean to the theory that a sudden weather disturbance, and not fire or explosion, caused the accident.
They point out that flying in such weather “the bottom might drop out”, that is, the plane might hit such a terrific down draft it would fall with tremendous force, then meet an updraft so violently that the resultant strain would damage the wings.
Between two such layers of clouds may occur potent electrical disturbances. If one layer were charged positively and the other negatively, a bolt sufficient to des
troy anything in its path might be hurled across the intervening space. Such a disturbance would be highly destructive.
In theory, aircraft in flight are supposed to be safe from lightning.
Pan-American Airways are now in their third year of operation of the trans pacific service from California to the Orient.
Before the first clipper went into scheduled operation, more than 5,000,000 dollars had been spent in preparing and experimenting with the service. The ser vice west of Hawaii does not yet show a profit.
The company has reduced the air mail passenger and express rates, but traffic meets direct steamer competition.
The crack steamers take 10 days. Given favourable conditions, at its fastest a clip per takes seven days to fly 9,000 miles from
San Francisco to Hong Kong. The short est cut to the Orient, from the United States, is on the North Pacific “great circle” course from Seattle—s,ooo miles.
It was flown non-stop in 1931 by the U.S. aviator, Clyde Pangbom. The fastest aerial crossing of the Pacific was made by the Graf Zeppelin in 1929, when she flew, during the course of a world cruise, from Tokio to Los Angeles in 79 hours, carrying a full load of passengers, mail and express.
Mr. du Faur, a mining engineer, who was in Papua a year or so ago in con nection with the testing of the claims pegged out by the late Jack Hides on the Strickland River, Western Papua, for In vestors, Limited, recently arrived in New T Caledonia by the “Pierre Loti” to make an inspection of Mr. Griffith’s Sunshine mine at Dumbea, west of Noumea, on behalf of an Australian syndicate.
Hon. C. T. Wurth, M.L.C., Commissioner of Lands in Papua, will leave Port Moresby on November 15 on long leave, at the expiration of which he will retire from the Papuan Government Service.
Mr. Wurth is a well-known and highly respected man in the Territory. He has spent more than 20 years in Papua in the service of the Administration and rose steadily from a junior position to
be Assistant Resident Magistrate, Resi dent Magistrate, and then head of an important department and a member of the Legislative Council.
Rev. and Mrs. N. G. Pardey, Methodist missionaries in Western Samoa, returned to Apia by the last “Matua” from New Zealand, with their two-months-old daughter.