TROOPS BY GLIDER.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 248, 17 September 1940, Page 2

TROOPS BY GLIDER.

Major F. A. do Y. Robertson writes in the Manchester Guardian: —If the Germans attempt to land troops by air in this country one possibility which ought not to bo overlooked is that gliders full of troops may be towed by aeroplanes. A writer in Flight has examined the possibilities of this. Rather fanciful pictures have been drawn at times of a whole train of gliders tethered nose to tail like camels and all lowed by one aeroplane. This is a flight of fancy. The chances of a mix-up would be too great. It is a practical possibility, however, that one Junkers 52 might carry twenty soldiers itself and tow a glider holding ten more. The glider would need to have a pilot, though not necessarily an aeroplane pilot. Gliding is a popular sport in Germany and in the Army there must be many men who arc practised glider pilots. It is reckoned that the tow would reduce the speed of the aeroplane by some twenty miles an hour, but that would pot matter very much, because if a British fighter were encountered the JU 52 would have little chance of I escaping even if it were unencumbered.

The plane would approach our coast at a great height and at a calculated distance the tow rope would be slipped and the two craft would come in to land separately. A glider flies silently and gives no warning to the Observer Corps or the sound locators. It lands on skids, not wheels, and pulls up in a short distance. Of course, if it were intercepted by a fighter the glider would be helpless, but it might puzzle the fighter pilot. It is conceivable that he might kill all the men inside it and yet, unless the glider pilot fell on to the joystick, the machine might go on gliding and might even land itself. That is not likely to happen. Gliders have to be built light and 6o cannot be very robust. They would almost certainly disintegrate under the bail of bulMs from the eight machine-guns of a British fighter.