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Hokitika Guardian, 27 November 1933, Page 4

At a London function held in honour of the Houston Mount Everest Flight- Expeditionary Party Colonel Stewart Blacker described the “fairylike beauty’-' of the scene from the aeroplane as Everest was approached; the appearance of the three tiny spelts of white which were Knnchenjuiiga, Everest- and M.rkaln. Steadily they grew, he said, till they became the great peaks which they had all seen in the Times photographs. - The experiences they enjoyed cn the flight,, he went on, were in themselves move than ample reward for the whole year’s hard work carried out -beforehand in planning and ' organisation. From first to last none of them ever lost sight of the scientific- possibilities

of really high flying. Nine tenths of the world was still unmapped, or only very roughly mapped, and it was usually forgotten that effective maps were tlie very bedrock of civilisation. It was by high flying that map-makers of the future would be able to portray 100 square miles from each photgraph. Not only was high flying the handmaiden of civilisation in this direction, but it was the stepping stones to those long-distance airways which they hoped woud link up all civilisations in general and the British Empire in particular. The intercolonial aeroplane of the future, flying in the thin air of the 30,000 ft-level, with oxygen laid on in its passenger cabin, with its highly supercharged engine and with its air screw with blades of controlable pitch, would have a speed of 300 miles an hour, and promised to be one of the main instruments to build up the civilisation of the future.