LEAVES FROM THE INSPECTOR'S NOTEBOOK.
Page 11
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
Public Service Airways.
IWAS LUCKY enough last week to run across Flight Commander MacMinnies, now an airman of front-rank reputation and a very fine flier indeed, dazzled with decorations. He was, before the war, Editor of Motor Cycling and a.particularly brilliant exponent of high-speed light-car driving, amongst other achievements winning the 'Grand Prix in France for this class of machine. All this is only of relative interest to readers of, The Commercial Motor, but the point is that MacMinnies, who is now managing the remarkably successful organization of Avro air services in the Blackpool, Southport, Manchester and Liverpool area, is a firm believer in the early favourable prospects of commercial aviation. As such, he finds serious fault with me for some of my own written opinions thereon in recent issues of The Commercial Motor. Says he : "Nobody expects it to be worth while to carry about lumps of steel or bags of coke, but, with the new machines that are in hand, commercial work on the lighter and more paying scales will undoubtedly be achieved."
Certainly the Blaekpool passenger-carrying organization 'has, to my knowledge, been remarkably successful, and the business end of it has been particularly capably handled. Questioned as to the difficulty of regular flying in doubtful weather, MiteMinnies confessed his incapacity as a weather prophet and also his conviction that, at present, nobody could tell much, if anything, about the weather far enough ahead for the krrowledge to be of much good. Fog, of course, is a particularly troublesome circumstance. Bothered by a thickish fog the other morning, at a time when one of his machines had to keep an appointment some few miles up the coast, he decided to take the pilot's seat himself, and he found that by flying only quite a few feet from the ground and following the foreshore all the way, he made his destination safely and without any very great trouble.
Perhaps it was this experiment which has convinced MacMinnies firmly that, inasmuch as flying must of course develop, and also since weather limitations will have to be mastered, what appears to him to be the most. practicable method to adopt is to lay down grass-land air-tracks across the country in all the principal directions. The idea of this would be that in foul weather -planes could fly low to the ground directly over these tracks, with the certainty of being able to land safely' anywhere at any time and in the absence of more extended optical evidence of whereabouts. My suggestions as to the colossal cost of any such provisions were met by the reminder that it would cost a pretty penny to put down the country's railways as they exist to-day! The scheme would have to be a gigantic one if it were to be of any use, and it would involve a clear grass-land track, free from all overhead obstacles such as trees, bridges, telegraph wires and so on; and, of course, it would have to be two or three hundreds yards wide ; it would, moreover, have to clinTh over all roads, railways, canals, rivers and undulations in the ground. Think of the bridges over the roads and try to count them!
That may or may not be a solution to the problem of making feasible all-weather flyin-g, but, if the colossal cost of any such scheme had to be added by percentage-to the existing or even a reduced cost of maintenance, the practical financial limitations to commercial aviation would be almost prohibitive. At any rate, the newest form of transport will lose nothing of development of which the super-enthusiasm of its devotees can assure it. • I admire this pioneer refusal to be disheartened, but I still think no order for commercial vehicles will be lost to a rival aeroplantechnicon manufacturer for the next ten years at any rate !