FORTUNES GO BEGGING

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 93, 14 January 1919, Page 5

FORTUNES GO BEGGING

PROBLEMS OF AERIAL FLIGHT. There is'a fortune. awaiting' anyone who can invent certain instruments that are badly needed just now by flying men. For instance, an indicator that will register ground speed—by which is meant distanco. flotfn over the ground in a given time. The indicators ,no\y iu use are, airspeed indicators, and their great drawback is that they only register accurately the distanco travelled when the aviator in flying on a perfectly still day. If he is flying with the wind, they register Jess than the actual distance flown, arid conversely, when he is flying against the wind, they register more than the real distanco covered;

In fact, it is quite possible for an indicator to tell the, aviator that he has travelled ono hundred miles in an hour, when as a matter of fact his aeroplane has all the while been poised stationary over the ground in the teeth of a one-hundred-mile per hour gale.

Another instrument that is badly needed is ono for registering leeway. That is to. say, one that will tell tho pilot how far he has been blown sideways when flying, let -us say, due north by compass in a wind whicTi is blowing due west.

Yet a third invention that will put heaps of money in the pockets of its lucky inventor is a contrivance for registering the exact position 'occupied by an in relation to the ground below when it is being tossed about by air eddies in' a thick mist or in a snow-storm.

Under such conditions a pilot, being out of sight of the earth, may be temporarily flying upside-down for-aught he knows. -, i. . . (