The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND SATURDAY, JULY 5, 1930. FIVE GUINEAS’ WORTH

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1016, 5 July 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET AUCKLAND SATURDAY, JULY 5, 1930. FIVE GUINEAS’ WORTH

A TRIP In a luxurious air-liner from London lo Glasgow by way of Manchester and Edinburgh costs only five guineas. The journey is equal in distance to an imaginary flight from Auckland to Wellington via Napier. It is accomplished regularly without any boasting about it in rather less than five hours’ flying time. Think of it and walk in envy and humiliation! The glorious British trip at midsummer means the most comfortable enjoyment of air-travel at a guinea an hour, or the very low expeiise of fractionally more than threepence a mile. It is cheaper than motoring in some countries, also .quicker and not so dangerous, and only a little dearer than a tram-car ride for each first mile in this progressive city. When are ifew Zealanders, at a price reasonable for the many, not merely for the few, who want to travel by air, to enjoy the opportunity given dour Scots to see a lovely land from the blue spaciousness of heaven? HoW long is this Dominion to remain a backward or at best a laggard nation in respect of aviation and modern transport enterprise? The latest silver-wing air-liners in Great Britain have accommodation for twenty-two passengers. Each is furnished with blue wicker chairs upholstered in blue, while the same hue appropriately graces the ceiling of the cabin. There is the same comfort as that provided on the best ocean liners. A steward is constantly in attendance offering fruit and refreshments. Given a perfect flying day, and the fortunate folk who fly from Old Thames to the Clyde experience dream transport. Below, an ancient land “looks as clean and green as beech leaves in spring.” Architects and town-planners take to the air for their inspiration and, with clear vision, see how men and women could and should make a country beautiful. They observe the folly of huddling houses into areas which, denied a generous share of the life-force of the sun, must in time inevitably become hideous slums. And from a long and wide view inspired watchers from the sky realise in England the beauty, the abiding value of open roads, alluring approaches to cosy, enduring homes, and the bright charm of gardens and bird-haunted woods.

Five hundred local bodies in New Zealand might acquire an immortality of fame if they could survey their municipal territories from the air and mark the cluttered places to avoid errors of design and muddle of residential settlement at a cost more extravagant than expenditure on kings’ palaces. For engineers and great industrialists sky-voyaging reveals the necessity of transforming the bulk of a country’s coal into electrical energy, so that industrial centres may not be defiled by a low canopy of sooty clouds, and almost perpetually robbed of the sunshine that saves a race from stunted children and the menace of disease. As an English writer phrases it, “the whole land of industrial England seems to he wrapped in a grey cloud . . . with (as seen darkly through the haze from a sunlit altitude) factories to the left of us, factories to the right of ns, factories below us, smoking and hooting.” Electricity would disperse most of England’s industrial mist. But not enough thoughtful people yet have flown over the black belts of Great Britain. And quite naturally those who have winged their way f rom London to Glasgow prefer to be lyrical over and about the glory of hills and valleys, the lakes and lochs among heather, the fresh greenness of trim farms, the pale gold of sunshine on the Solway Firth as the air-liner fronts the Scottish Border, and heads for the cragged and castled citadel of Edinburgh, with a noble bridge arching the vault above the Firth of Forth. It is pleasant, of course, to read of or to remember the “exquisite thin music of the Tweed rippling over its pebbles,” and the bonnie holms of Yarrow, to say nothing about. St. Mary’s Loch, “where every swan floats double, swan and shadow,” but is it not time New Zealanders more often had a chance to fly over their own delectable land and know there is none more beautiful, if it be spared the muddled ruin the hand of foolish man may do? All over Great Britain these days, throughout Western Europe, along the Northern Mediterranean coast to the Isles of Greece and eastward across desert places to India; in North and South America; and in Australia, airplanes and air-liners soar like great white birds into summer skies, raising progress upward and ever onward. Here, for the majority of people, whose pioneering and war-time history has been adventurous enough, the thrill of transport is to be jostled in a crowded tram-car, or to jaunt occasionally in a motor-ear taxed and regulated beyond the limits of pleasure. Now and again, a few lucky individuals with ability to afford a luxury, soar beyond humdrum service and stupidity for half an hour or so. What is wrong with New Zealand enterprise? Surely it, lias not become clogged with butter-fat, or perhaps atrophied by the political yelling for more and still more agricultural production.