AVIATORS BUSY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXV, Issue 4780, 24 November 1924, Page 4

AVIATORS BUSY.

AUSTRALIAN MACHINES. PREPARING FOR BIG CONTEST. TEie Australian mechanic, happily, is an adaptable person. If others can achieve something, so can he on the land, the sea, or in the air. Just now the air is the attraction to be up among the birds —and if the signs of activity in aeroplane building in and around Sydney to-day are any criterion, the airways presently will be almost as congested with ’planes as the streets are with motor cars. In all sorts of out-of-the-way corners construction work is in progress —in a loft in Pitt Street, in a backroom workshop of Campbell Street, in premises along the Parramatta Road, and in a back yard at Ryde. The immediate object of this seemingly unprecendented spasm of, eneigy to win.laurels in air travel is the big all Australian six day aerial contest, which is being organised by the Royal Australian Aero Club, to be held at Richmond Aerodrome from November 29 to December 6, The Commonwealth Government has offered £5OO in prize money for the best Australian designed and built machine, to which Mr Lebbeus Hordern has added another £5OO, the Australian Aero Club arid Messis C. C. Wakefield and Co., Ltd. (lubrication specialists), each £lOO, and the British Iriiperial Oil Company and the Vacuum Oil Company each fifty guineas. The outstanding idea is to secure an all-Australian designed and built machine of low power but high efficiency. It seems likely .to be aecom<plished. The Minister for Defence (Mr E. K. Bo wden), in company with a dozen enthusiasts, visited half a dozen places in and about Sydney in which ’planes are in course of construction for the coming contests. Most of them were unfinished —in, the skeleton, as it. were—but the inspection afforded an interesting idea of the enthusiasm that and of the ingenuity of the Australian mechanic. Probably the most interesting of the series was the back-yard product of Mr L. J. R. Jones, a mechanic who saw much war service, and who, from his own design, is evolving a plane which, when finished, in about a fortnight’s time will, have been built to the last strjut—even the six-cylinder engine, weighing only 50 lbs—by hiiriself, his father, and his young wife. And he intends flying it himself.