Trans-Pacific
p. 20 · Read in the full issue
Airmails
New Australian Line Suggested
rAT Australia and America soon will be linked by two trans-Pacific air lines, one of which will be Austra lian, was a prediction made in San Francisco on January 14 by the noted Australian airman, Captain P. G. Tay lor, who, accompanied by Captain Les ter Brain, operations manager of Qantas Empire Airways Ltd., is on a special mis sion to the United States.
Captain Taylor said that Australia believed that aviation must be developed on an international basis and that land ing facilities must be granted by one country to the lines of other countries.
Australia certainly would welcome the completion of the Pan American Airways line, thus bringing the PAA clippers to Australian shores, and the Australians hoped to receive the same welcome in Hawaii and the American mainland.
As Captain Brain is closely connected with the organisation which, up to the outbreak of war, regularly carried out the seaplane mail service between Eng land and Australia via the East Indies, it is clear that an important move is afoot.
Nothing has been published beyond what is stated above, and Captain Tay lor’s mission is .described as “secret”, but the idea evidently is that there shall be a weekly airmail between Australia and the United States, the mail being carried one week by Pan American Air ways and the other week by British-Aus tralian interests'. rE South Pacific fortnightly air-mail and passenger service, between New Zealand and San Francisco, con tinues to be satisfactorily maintained by the big flying-boats of Pan American Airways.
There has been published a report that, at an early date, Pan American Airways will establish a “loop” seaplane service direct from Noumea to Brisbane and Sydney, with incoming mails and passengers, while mails and passengers for New Zealand will continue to go directly southeast from Noumea, as at present. This may be part of the plan on which Captains Taylor and Brain are working.
New Clippers nearing completion at the Boeing factory at Seattle are ex pected to begin to augment Pan Ameri can Airways’ Atlantic and Pacific air services by May 1. They are a later version of the present Boeing Clippers, will be more powerful, and will have an increased fuel capacity. The purchase of three Atlantic Clipper type flying boats from Pan American Airways to be used to maintain Empire communications was announced in December, when it was believed that six new Clippers had been ordered from the Boeing factory.