4 Miles a Minute!

Hokitika Guardian, 21 October 1922, Page 4

4 Miles a Minute!

THE LATEST IN AIR SPEEDS.

(.By Harry Harper.) , Rushing across the sky the oilier afternoon, with a murmur which rose to a roar, a British racing aeroplane, being “tuned up” for an impending contest, flashed above those gazing upward and vanished with distant, metal- , lie mut.terings. j In tlic machine, sitting low behind his screen in a wind-proof cockpit, the | pilot was watching a speed-recorder. . Its needle, as the great engine was ac- ; ccleratcd, had crept to 150 miles an hour, and, before long, to 200 miles an hour. Nor did it pause. Now it was at 210 miles an hour. Now 220! And at last, in a supreme burst of speed, the projectile-like craft was whirling itself and its driver through the aid at ; 210 miles an hour. ■

Four miles a minute! What must be ■ the sensations of the man up there, dovouring distance ’at this terrifying speedP ■ Strangely enough, they are not exsiting. And the reason is easy to understand. We usually judge speed j when in motor-cars or trains by the j flashing past of the trees, hedges, and telegraph poles. But in the air, thousands of feet high, there is nothing of the kind; only the emptiness of airspace. And, when the airman looks down, landmarks are at such a distance and they appear to move away so gradually behind him, that the impression is deceptive; it conveys only the idea that the aeroplane is travelling slowly, whereas it is flying at a speed greatly in excess of swift earth vehides. !

Bo reft, then, of eye judgment of pace the airman learns to rely, apart from his speed-indicator, upon tell-tale sounds. Ho listens to the noise and “hum” of the air as it tears past struts and wires; a mingled sound which rises or falls, or changes its note, according chine.

to alterations in the speed of the ma-

The pilot of a super-speed racing machine, however, lias not even this earguidance. Experience shows that when flying through the air at, say UiO miles an hour in a racing ’plane, the pilot has less audible indications than he would in an ordinary ’plane travelling at about half that speed. Why is this? Again the answer is simple. The racing ’plane is so “streamlined,” so “cleaned up” to reduce the resistance it offers to its own rush througli the air, that external wires, struts, and other supports do not contribute their note to a general speed-song, being dispensed with'wherever it is possible to do without them. Apart from its engine-roar, the racer does its tour miles a minute with an astonishing lack of “thrill” for the pilot, who is concerned mainly with prosaic dials and gauges. Mis eye seldom leaves the needle which tells him something his senses fail to reveal—that is, the pace, from moment to moment, at which he is hurtling through the air.

Two moments there are, however, when the eye tells the racing airman some talc of speed. The first is when his machine, gathering speed from a standstill, rushes across the flying ground till its pace is sufficient lor its short, stubby wings to hear it through the air; and the lecond comes when, reducing the power of his great engine, he nears the earth and glimpses the rearward rush of trees and hedges. Rut at neither of these moments is he moving at anything like the speed lie attains when well aloft. Experts tell us that when high-alti-tude motors and screws are commercially practicable, and cabins arc perfected ill which, even at very greatheights, wc are provided with air as bronthenfile as that at low altitudes, we shall rush on long journeys at the prodigious speed of 300 miles an hour. And, owing to the vast altitude and the silencing of the machine, wc shall sit in luxurious armchairs, in a vibrntionlcss saloon, looking down at an earth rendered remote by distance, with practically nothing to tell us we are moving five times ns fast as an express train!