SPEEDIER MAILS

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21208, 3 September 1940, Page 2

SPEEDIER MAILS

SCOOP DEVICE FOR PLANES NO NEED TO STOP Speeding at 100 miles an hour, states the Christian Science Monitor, an airplane picked up a 100-pound mail container today in a demonstration of an improved method which is expected to bring airmail service to nearly three score towns without regular air transport service. Stewart C. Plummer, Chief Engineer, and Norman Rintoul, Chief Pilot for All American Aviation, Inc., conducted the experiment at the Aviation Manufacturing Corporation factory here. The new pickup mechanism had just been installed in one of the Stinson reliant planes and will be used next week on’five lines totaling 2500 miles extending from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and Williamsport, Pa., Jamestown, N.Y., and Huntington, W. Va. For the past year, operating under a special Act of Congress, All American has been dropping and picking up mail with a grappling hook on the end of a cable which grabbed a sack strung between two 30-foot poles. Mr Plummer said no mail had been lost in 70,000 piefcups from towns which lacked facilities for mail planes to land and take off in the usual wav How Device Works The new device developed by Mr Plummer replaces the dangling rope with a metal pole hinged to the tail of the plane and requires no more elaborate ground equipment than two ordinary bamboo poles which hold a loop of light rope about 10 feet off the ground. There are shock absorbing devices to reduce the bounce when the plane drops one sack of mail and picks up another and a mechanical winch to replace the old system of hauling the mail up to the plane by hand after the pickup. The same pole and hook are used for putting down one mail container and picking up another on a single swoop over the field Although the mail planes can land at 50 miles an hour, the mail delivery and pick-up are made at a speed of approximately 100 miles an hour. This, it was explained, adds a safety factor and also makes almost negligible the difference in time between a straight flight between two large cities and the same flight including several mail pickups.