Part 4 (1/2)
Four days later she left Halifax for Trepa.s.sey in a last-minute effort to catch her sister planes. It seemed certain that she could not get there in time and would be forced to follow on the course a day later.
Just as she flew into Trepa.s.sey Bay, on May 14th, the NC-1 and NC-3 were preparing to take-off. They postponed their start until the next day. In the mean while repairs were rushed and adjustments made, and she was ready to start the next afternoon, when all three planes started a little after six o'clock.
From the beginning of the flight from Trepa.s.sey the NC-4, thought to be the ”lame duck” of the squadron, ran away from the other two machines. She lost contact with them very quickly and plowed through the night alone, laying her course by the line of destroyers lying beneath her. She was about half an hour ahead of the NC-1 at daybreak the next day and within an easy run of Horta, Fayal.
The half-hour lead gave the NC-4 a chance to get through a fog which was coming up over the Azores ahead of the other machines. She held a little above it until she thought she was in the right position. Then she came down through the mist. As it happened, she landed in the wrong harbor, but picked herself up and found Horta a few minutes later. She landed in Horta after fifteen hours and eighteen minutes of flying, in which she averaged 78.4 nautical miles an hour for the flight.
The machine was nearly five hours ahead of the schedule laid down by the Navy Department.
Both the other planes were forced to land at sea, the NC-3 after 1,250 miles of flight--the longest ever made over water up to that time--and the NC-1 after more than 1,100 miles in the air.
The NC-1 with Bellinger and his crew was picked up on the morning of Sat.u.r.day, May 17th, by a Greek steamer, the _Ionia_, and brought into Horta. Towers with the NC-3 tossed about for nearly sixty hours at sea and was not picked up until the following Monday, when the public had begun to fear for his safety.
On Tuesday, May 20th, the NC-4 hopped off for the shortest leg of the flight, 150 miles from Horta to Ponta Delgada, where the fuel and supplies for the machines were. With favoring winds at her back, and with the lightest load she had carried, she covered the distance in one hour and forty-four minutes, an average speed of 86.7 nautical miles an hour, or more than 99 land miles. This was a new record for the seaplanes on the ocean flight.
Meanwhile Harry G. Hawker and Lieut.-Commander Mackenzie Grieve, the Sopwith team waiting so long at St. John's for a chance to fly, stimulated in their daring attempt by reports of American successes at the Azores, took-off on their flight straight across on the afternoon of Sunday, May 18th. All through that night he flew, when his engine began to give signs of overheating, due to a clogged water-filter.
Early the next morning, about half-way across, Hawker decided that there was no chance to make the land, and began looking through the fog for a chance for a safe landing.
By zigzagging on the steams.h.i.+p courses for about two hours, with his engine hot but running well, he picked up the Danish steamer _Mary_, and pancaked on the water about two miles ahead of her. Because the little tramp steamer had no wireless, the world was kept waiting a week, before word was signaled to land that Hawker and Grieve were safe.
With the Sopwith team out of the race, it became evident that Commander Read and the NC-4 would actually win the honors for the first flight. On the morning of May 27th he started over his well-patrolled course of eight hundred miles, and, after a little less than ten hours of flight, brought his machine into the harbor before Lisbon, Portugal. Americans had crossed the ocean in the air, and the enthusiastic Portuguese capital turned out to do them every honor.
Read, however, rather than linger, pushed on again May 30th, in the midst of the celebration for his triumph on the last leg of his course to Plymouth, seven hundred and seventy-five nautical miles. Engine trouble, the first since the machine had left Chatham, developed, and at the end of two hours he was forced to land at the mouth of the Mondego River, about a hundred miles on his way. The trouble was a water leak. It was quickly repaired, and he started again, but decided to put up at Ferrol, Spain, two hundred miles farther on the course, for the night.
Early in the morning of May 31st Commander Read started from Ferrol for Plymouth, and at the end of seven hours and six minutes of flight came down in the harbor, where a warm reception was waiting for him.
The actual flying time since leaving the Rockaway Naval Air Station was fifty-seven hours and sixteen minutes, and the average rate of flight was at a speed of sixty-eight nautical miles an hour.
VII
LANDING-FIELDS--THE IMMEDIATE NEED
The immediate need, to establish aviation throughout the entire country, is a series of landing-fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast. These landing-fields should not be designed primarily for transcontinental flying-stations, but for city-to-city flying.
There is going to be a great amount of aerial traffic from New York to San Francisco, to be sure, but the future of flying is in the linking up of cities a few hundred miles apart. The War Department has already taken steps, and will establish thirty-two fields in the country to encourage flying. Many more are needed.
Atlantic City is apparently the pioneer air port of the country, and for many reasons this is natural. There are political and social advantages which make Atlantic City ideal. Rules have been laid down for the coming and going of airs.h.i.+ps, and a field for land machines and water s.p.a.ce for seaplanes have been laid out. A large aeronautical convention has already been held there.
Every city in the United States will have a landing-field and hangars for airplanes, as well as mechanics to care for them. Whether this is to be a private or public enterprise lies in the hands of the people handling such things. Much could be said for either type of establishment. The thing must come; it is as logical as one, two, three. There are some, perhaps, who remember the roars of derision which went up when the first automobile garage was established in their town. Such a thing was visionary-there would never be enough machines to make it pay!
There are many reasons why it is impossible to consider the use of city roofs, for the present, as suitable landing-places for airplanes.
In fact, the first successful landing on a roof made by Jules Vedrines last January was hailed as a feat of almost unparalleled daring. He flew and landed on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, and won a prize of $5,000 for doing it. The police of Paris refused to allow him to fly off the roof, and he was compelled to take his machine apart and lower it in an elevator.
The theory of flight, the laws which make it possible apparently to defy all laws of gravitation, make it impossible for us to depend on the roofs of buildings in large cities and landing-places. It will be a long time before the dreams of men who would establish landing-places on hotel roofs can come true. The progress of aeronautical development has been great enough so that there is no need to overemphasize it--to set ridiculous tasks which cannot be accomplished.
We shall not see the business man flying to his office in the city from his country estate--unless some landing-field is built on the lower end of Manhattan Island as has been proposed. The Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York has taken up the matter of legislation to make landing-fields possible, and it must go through.
The business man ought, in the near future, to be able to use the airplane for quick trips to Albany. It would save hours over rail time, and here the airplane has a wonderful field of usefulness.