OBSERVATION PLANE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 November 1943, Page 4

OBSERVATION PLANE

USEFUL BUT NOT A SECRET

WEAPON.

Britain’s newest “secret weapon,” which has been causing a minor flurry in London, is a plane almost exactly the same as the Club in which Amerie same as the Cub in which Ameririding for years, the American Associated Press reported recently. z The plane—known as the Taylorcraft Auster-3—has been used by the British with no attempt at secrecy since the beginning of the war, and is similar to the United States Army Air Force’s standard Grasshopper observation plane—with the same job to do. The story of how the innocuous 100-mile-an-hour unarmed, two-seater cabin “taxi” monoplane, used for observation and freight carrying, became magnied in a secret-weapon-conscious capital into a sensational new gadget is this:

A reporter for the “Aeroplane” magazine spent a day at an Auster base and wrote a technical description of the plane, mentioning a new edition with a 130-horsepower motor in place of the former 90-horsepower type that saw service with the British Expeditionary Force in France and in the Tunisian campaign, buzzing around slowly among the hills out of reach of fast enemy planes, spotting artillery emplacements which high-speed ships breezed by too fast to see.

The “Aeroplane’s” account of the plane was on the. news stands for a week when a London newspaper picked up the story, described the added 40 horsepower and the plane’s function —standard technique in the war—as a sttartling innovation, and said that the plane’s newest stunt was to draw the enemy’s fire. Actually, like all light planes, it endeavors to stay as far away from enemy fire as possible. Both the British Army and the United States Army Air Force have found the little planes—despite their lack of armour—surprisingly successful in accomplishing their missions without being hit. Germany and most other nations have similar types of planes.