OVER CLIFF

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 257, 22 June 1932, Page 8

OVER CLIFF

SAFETY AEROPLANE YOUNG FRENCH AIRMAN TESTS A CRASH PROOF INVENTION. HINDERED BY POLICE. Albert Sauvant, the young French airman, who for weeks has been hindered by the poliee from. taking up an airplane to demonstrate a crashproof invention, has at last tricked the authorities by heing pushed over a cliff in a wingless machine. He erashed 500 feet to the bottom of a rocky ravine — and immediately raised the lid of his safety cabin, and stepped out, smiling and unhurt. Then, climbing a steep path up the cliff to the top, where his wife was waiting to kiss him, he stumbled and tore his arm rather hadly. Such is the luek of inventors, he says. It was a very secret gathering of conspirators who saw the airplane pushed over the cliff top into space. There were Mme. Sauvant, two friends and the Mayor of Escagnolles. For the inventor was at his wits' end to find a way of crashing. The Government, fearful that he would kill himself in the attempt had forbidden the experiment of a deliherate crash while flying. Police had hounded him from place to place to see that ( he took no risks. His flying license was talcen away, and then, on ^the grounds that M. Sauvant's machine was unlicensed, the police took away pieces of the actual airplane, ranging from sparking plugs to landing wheels. Then the energetic little inventor with the sleek hlack heard and the peach-coloured skin thought of a trick worth two of these. He took as much of his airplane as they had left him, removed itr wings and engines, and lugged it to the edge of the cliff. "Voila!" he said with French logic. "This is no longer an airplane. They can't object now." And he called the conspirators together, jumped into the stripped fuselage, shouted out "Push," and realised his life's ambition by falling through space to end with a hump. His device resembles one large egg shell inside another. The airplane was wrecked on reaching the foot of the cliff. But amid the wreckage the inner shell of M. Sauvant's enormous egg remained fast, and tlie inventor had to put up with notliing more than a bruise or two. I talked to him again soon afterwards at his home at Nice. "Every one laughed at me before," he said. "To-day many people want to see me, and maka fiattering offers. "I am now out for what I can get. Perhaps at last the French Government might relent and allow me to carry out experiments as I originally planned — to crash from 3000 feet — but if they do not I shall do it for any cinema firm who pays for my machine and in any country which will allow me to do it."