FLYING ACROSS CANADA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 May 1940, Page 3

FLYING ACROSS CANADA

PASSENGER AND MAIL SERVICE. After months of preparation costing the Canadian Government nearly £3.250.000. an air service for passengers and mails has been inaugurated. Using a fleet of Lockheed air liners for the service, the machines have a cruising speed of about 200 rn.p.h. and a range of about 1,600 miles when car rying 10 passengers and a big cargo of goods or mails. Operating between Montreal and Vancouver, they are assisted by smaller aircraft which fly from North Bay to Toronto, from Lethbridge to Calgary and Edmonton, and from Vancouver across the border to Seattle.

The daily service covers a route of more than 2688 miles of organised airway. Aircraft will ply along this route daily in winter and summer, on a main stream of communications into which lesser- lines, serving the more remote provinces and the northern parts of Canada on the one hand, and the main centres in the United States on the other, will flow.

At intervals of 100 miles along the route are fully equipped airports. Between these at distances of about 35 miles are landing fields, where the airliners may come down in case of emergency. Some of these have been cut out of forest and bush country, and some are to bo found 4000 feet up in the. Rockies.

This wonderful air service is certainly an achievement of which the Dominion of Canada should be justly proud.