AERIAL ADVENTURES

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1056, 21 August 1930, Page 14

AERIAL ADVENTURES

RECORD LONDON-CAPETOWN FLIGHT DUCHESS OF BEDFORD’S EFFORT Curious and startling adventures of air travel befell the Duchess of Bedford on her record London to Capetown and return flight in April this year. The long journey which the Fokker monoplane Spider made, described by the Director of Civil Aviation in Great Britain, Sir Sefton Brancker, as ‘“the best thing in civil aviation for three or four years,” as detailed by the navigator and assistant pilot, Mr. Robert Little, is a fascinating story of crowded hours of incident. “Adventures on the flight started when we were flying over hundreds of miles of forest, in which it would have been impossible to land, in Tanganyika,” Mr. Little told a representative of the Shell Company, which arranged the spirit and oil supplies over the whole route. “To our horror we saw that the oil gauge showed only four gallons left. A few minutes later it was two gallons. We had two or three more hours’ flying before we could hope to land. We thought that the only thing to do was to make a forced landing in the forest, though we knew our chance of being found or heard of again was remote. Soon after this, tho oil disappeared from the oil gauge altogether, and we assumed that the end was at hand, and flew on, waiting for the machine to stop. To our amazement, however, it did not stop, and when we ultimately landed we found that the oil gauge had merely broken, while the tank was full of oil. LOST OVER DESERT *

“In Rhodesia we ran into very bad weather while flying above dense forests. We were flying under a curtain of low clouds just above the trees, and surrounded by hills, and were circling round looking for a way out, because it was impossible to fly into the clouds without the danger of hitting the mountains around us, and eventually we had to go miles off our course in our effort to find a gap through the clouds. Presently we decided to steer south in the hopes of seeing the Zambesi, which would give us. our position, but to our dismay we could not find it. This was very serious,' as there was nothing but masses of trees and jungle in which we could not land. After hours of flying, with petrol getting short, we came to the conclusion that we had lost our way, and we should merely have to fly on with jungle underneath until we crashed. Captain Barnard and I mutually agreed, that it was all up, but we did not say anything to the Duchess, who was busy studying the wild game through her field glasses, which were very close, as we were flying so low. When we had less than one hour’s petrol supply, to our immense joy, we saw some mine buildings, and a few minutes later a railway line, which we were immediately able to identify as the Livingstone and Bulawayo railway line. This meant, -of course, that

as soon as we could find somewhere to land W’e were saved from being utterly lost in the jungle. What we had been afraid of was that we were west of Livingstone, in which case there would only have been thousands of miles of desert, in which we should have had no hope whatever. OVERCOME BY GAS “Xear Bulawayo Captain Barnard, who was flying the machine, became so overpoweringly sleepy that he sent a note for me to take over from him. The Duchess also fell heavily asleep, and when I had taken over for about 10 minutes I could hardly keep my eyes open. Things became so difficult that we could only fly by taking turns of about 20 minutes each, and the moment I was relieved from the controls I used to doze until awakened at the end of 20 minutes. On landing, we found that this was due to an exhaust pipe inside the fuselage, which had broken, and was filling the place with carbon monoxide gas. There is no doubt that we had a very lucky escape on this occasion; on top of all this, we found that the flame from the broken exhaust pipe was playing directly on the carburettor, and might easily have set the machine on fire. PLAGUE OF FLIES “A plague of flies we came across in Khartoum was most interesting. One night \ve were being entertained at the Grand Hotel, when a plague of tiny green flies came on. which were so dense that the three lights over the billiards table 'were entirely obscured by the solid mass of flies, so that we had to turn the lights ,out to be able to see to play. Throughout the flight we satisfied ourselves with practically only one meal a day, which was dinner, after we landed for the night. We started so early every morning that we had to be content with a cup of tea.” The Duchess of Bedford, who is 64 years old, has been an enthusiastic flier since 1926, and has a flying record of over 50,000 miles to her credit. It will be remembered that, with Captain Barnard, she flew by stages to India and back last year,* and has since made two extended air tours in Europe. Besides being such an experienced aviatrix, the duchess is an expert on ornithology and zoology. She is the daughter of Archdeacon Tribe, of Simla, and married the Duke of Bedford in 1888.