NAVIGATION OF THE AIR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9122, 23 June 1908, Page 5

NAVIGATION OF THE AIR.

A SUCCESSFUL FLIGHT,

Received June 22, 10.35 p.m. BERNE, June 22. Zeppelin's new airship, which is 450 feet long, with eighteen persons on board, including Prince George of Bavaria, crossed Lake Constance at Friedrichshafen, at a height of 300 feet. The airship was easily able to rise, descend and manoeuvre.

Up to the present time men have taken up fljing partly from scientific interest, partly from sport and partly from business reasons, but a time is rapidly approaching when the art "•i'l have reached a state of develop : m%.it such that men can practise it without the necessity of maintaining a private laboratory or a manufacturing plant, writes Wilber Wright in the "Scientific American." Considered as a sport, flying possesses attractions which will appeal to many persons Kvith a force beyond that exercised by any of the similar sports, such as boating, cycling, or automobiling. There is a sense of exhilaration in flying through the free air, an intensity of enjoyment, which possibly may be due to the satisfaction of an inborn longing transmitted to us from the days when our early ancestors gazed wonderingly at the frre flight of birds and contrasted it with their own slow and toilsome progress through the unbroken wilderness. Though methods oi travel have been greatly improved in the many centuries preceding our Own, men have never ceased to envy the birds and long for the day when they too might rise above the dust or mud o± the highways and fly through the clean air of the heavens. Once above the tree tops, the narrow roads no longer arbitrarily fix the course. The earth is spread out before the eye with a richness of colour and beauty of pattern never imagined by those who have gazed at the landscape edgewise only. The view of the ordinary traveller is as inadequate as that of an ar.t crawling over a magnificent rug. The ricn brown of freshly-turned earth, the lighter shades of dry ground, the still lighter browns and yellows of ripening crops,' the almost innumerable shades of green produced by grasses and toivsts,! together present a sight who3e beauty has been confined to iKtlloonists alone in the past. With the comirg of the flyer, the pleasures of ballooning, are joined with those of automobiling to form a supreme combination.