AID TO RUSSIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 October 1941, Page 7

AID TO RUSSIA

POSSIBLE AIR ROUTES TRANS-SIBERIAN FLIGHT. EXPLORATIONS MADE. (Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a wellknown Arctic explorer, scientist, and author, discusses in the following article the probable routes and conditions encountered by the 47 members of the Russian Aviation Mission who flew from Moscow to Nome, Alaska, recently,) Forty-seven mysterious passengers and an arrival at Nome without forewarning have given Mikhail Gromov during the last few days as much publicity as he had during July, 1937, when his single-engined monoplane with co-pilot Andrei Yumashev and navigator Sergei Danlin flew nonstop from Moscow to San Diego (San Jacinto) by way of the North Pole, incidentally breaking the previous longdistance record by 658 miles. Gromov is probably pleased with the notice the press is taking for it was reported in 1937 that the main aim of his flight was to interest the United States in three lines of air service—from Moscow to New York by way of Alaska, from Moscow to Chicago (or New York) by way of Iceland, and from Moscow to Seattle and San Francisco by way of the North Pole. Now Gromov’s arrival via north-eastern Siberia and north-western America is calling attention to the first of these three routes, the potential Alaska transportation highway for any military or civilian aircraft with which the United States may furnish the Soviets under its programme of collaboration with them against the Nazis. The route by which Gromov came is properly a military secret of his government, and of the United States Government as collaborators. But we can at least discuss trans-Siberian flying in general terms. To a pilot who has made it in a single hop from Moscow to San Diego by way of the North Pole, it will seem natural to cut corners, and there will have been on his part, as he crossed Siberia, no fear of shaping a northerly course to find a better way. Accordingly, he may have used one of the shorter of the good routes, for instance, steering at first north-east from Moscow and traversing Arctic Siberia so as to cut nearly at right angles the various great northward-flowing rivers and going by way of the airports that have been created along those rivers during the last few years. It is another Soviet military secret just where some of the air bases lie; but we do know there are one or more air centres on every one of these big rivers, sup-plied-with petroleum and other necessities by steamers from Murmansk and Archangel. For fling-boats such as Gromov used, and for all water craft, this is a good route. For after the first few hundred miles from Moscow you have beneath you all the rest of the way ground that is permanently frozen. You may be passing over fields of waving grain, dense forests, grassy prairies, but if there are also lakes so numerous that anything from a quarter to half of the surface is covered, then you know that you are traversing frozen ground, for that amount of water on land is not known anywhere on the earth except where the thawed top soil rests upon eternally frozen strata that prevent underground drainage. On such a route you would not often go 10 miles, and you would never go 100, without having within gliding distance water nearly ideal for the emergency descent of a fling-boat. But with engines as reliable as they are now, there will have been nothing to prevent Gromov from taking the longer road of fewer lakes that parallels roughly the trans-Siberian railway, passing through cities like Omsk and Irkutsk. Even so, it would seem likely that from Irkutsk the party would have gone more northerly, entering the lake section and using such air bases as those of Yakutsk on the Lena river, Verkne-Kolymsk on the Kolyma, Anadyrsk (or Markovo) near Bering Sea —which bings them to Nome. Equally they may have continued from Irkutsk more southerly to Khabarovsk, where they would have turned north-east by way of Nikolaevsk and across the Sea of Okhotsk to the Gulf of Anadyr and thence to Nome. If he wanted to save more mileage than he could by the route we first described. Gromov may have gone so far north that for part of the time he followed the Arctic coast of Siberia. Then he will have used for ports of call the air centres that are at the mouths of the large rivers. But we 1 think he would not do this, for likely the greater trouble with fog would more than outweigh the saving in distance. Arctic fogs are special. If you parallel a northern coast in summer you are bound to meet them; but they are a problem not so very difficult for an. experienced man like Gromov, since there are helpful principles upon which the experts rely. They know, for instance, that when the wind is from sea to land then the fog is on the land with the sea clear, and that when the wind is from land to sea the fog is on the sea with the land clear. There is a comfort, too, in knowing that such coastal fog belts, parallel to the shore, are seldom more than 20 miles wide, whether the fog" is on the sea or the land, and that it is seldom more than a few hundred feet deep, so that hilltops will stick up into the clear weather, and even the tips of ship masts and'housetops. The very shortest route from Moscow to Nome would be out over the sea during more than a third of the distance and we can be fairly sure that this course was not taken —it would be taken only in an emergency, where speed was practically the only consideration; whereupon the flier would have a small crew, and fuel tanks occupying the space which Gromov’s 46 passengers must have required. But routes that cross Siberia from Moscow to Nome did not properly require any pioneering this summer of 1941, if the task is to ferry from here to Moscow long distance flying-boats of our Navy bomber type. For it is one of the commonplaces of the history of aviation that flying development has nowhere in the world been so rapid and satisfactory as along that very course which is the nearest ruote over our spherical world from the United States to the western Soviet Union. Four years ago Alaska, with about 30,000 whites, created about 70 per cent as much air freight as did 130,000,000 of their fellow Americans in the States. That same year the northern half of Canada, with less than 50,000 persons, transported more tons by air than did the States. But it is the common opinion that neither Canada nor Alaska has ' developed its air traffic during the last

decade as rapidly, systematically and successfully as did northern Siberia. Three years ago there were reported to be in constant, all-season service in the Arctic and sub-Arctic Soviet Union more than 1009 aeroplanes, as compared with less than 200 in either Canada or Alaska. So whatever was Gromov’s route, we cannot think of it as having required first exploration this year.