FLYING MACHINES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 2665, 22 November 1909, Page 3

FLYING MACHINES.

THE NEW SPORT.

AN AVIATOR’S- PREDICTIONS

You can have your own . flying machine for. £1750 f.o.b. Paris. But unless you have plenty of spare ground wherein to keep it, and to exercise from, it will be more a white elephant than a bird, and the cost of your occasional flying trip will soon total a good deal more than the original cost. So says Mr. Colin De Fries; expert aviator, who arrived in Sydney last week. “When will we be able to have them about overhead as familiar ai sight as the motor cars in the streets?” he was asked by a “Sydney Morning Herald” interviewer. “Never. You can’t keep an aeroplane in your back yard, vou 'know.” “Well, but for those who have room for them?” " “You have to start in open country, and come down in open country. You can’t come down in the middlo of a city, for instance.” So the dream of the air filled with acres, and an alighting tower-station for the Aerial Transport Company’s passengers somewhere about the centre of Sydney, is, according to the expert, not likely to occur. “But they will become plentiful?” “I think there is an enormous future for the sale of machines to squatters, who have lots of money, and lots of country. Racing?'Yes; it- will he one of the big sports. You’ll never get women to go up in them. It’s not safe enough.” He proceeded to demonstrate how also it’s not cheap enough—at present, at least. He has a Wright machine, upon which he has implanted improvements of his own coming out in the Otranto. Later there is a Bloriot, similar to the one in which the inventor whose name it bears crossed the English Channel. Ho lias two mechanics experienced' in aerial navigation, and eight others—a staff of 10. Then on the other score of the risk, he month ned that the machines weigh about 9-Jewt. So that with a man on board there was over half a ton slashing through the air. “The great thing wanted is to “gear speed down,” he observed. “If we could go slowly wo would go with much more certainty. The thing’ is your motor. If it stops you’re in trouble. During the Rheims week they had a height competition. Would you believe it, they couldn’t get anyone to go in for it. And I don’t blame them. What’s the good? One little mishap, and you’ve a return ticket that you can’t use. This reminded the aviator of an incident at the Rheims carnival. “.People could not start in races together; there wasn’t room. Everybody had his schedule time. He was given a certain allowance, and if he didn’t get started In was out of it. M. Bleriot had lost his start in several races. The chair/nan of the committee (the Marqurj do Pohgnac, came up and told him that if he didn’t get off this time he would be scratched for all races. Bleriot was the hero of the Channel flight, the man of the hour. This from the chairman! Just imagine the excitement. There was a good five minutes of gesticulating and shrugging of shoulders. Bleriot and his wife—who was also there-—were furious. Bleriot jumped into his seat in a terrific rage. He yelled to his mechanicians to start, and ho dashed oT still shouting and waving his hands. There were a couple- of haystacks in the field, and not noticing them in Ins excitement he went bang into them, the machine turned over, and } "or Bleriot was pitched into the hay.” Mr De Fries is a yoTmg Londoner. It was the natural sequence of motor racing, as he put it, that he took to aviation. Ho motored in France, England, and Germany. The aeroplanes ‘came along, “and” he said, “it comes natural to take an interest in.them." Hi? longest distance on the “great big birds” is five miles. His opinion as to the flying machine of the future is that it.will be a sort of mixture of balloon and aeroplane—-the one to provide necessary sustaining oj weight in the air, and the other to do the propelling. Bleriot when ho crossed the Channel, ho remarked, carried a reservoir of air so that if he fell into the sea he., would float. That Mr Do Fries looks upon as a forerunner of the future. When he lands his machines, and. puts them together, he may add to his experiments by a long-distance flight.. “1 was looking at the harbor to-day,” he said. “I could fly, across it, but there is nowhere to start from; it’s all trees’. I may, do it, starting from inland.” Altogether, to sum up the voice oi some amount of experience, there is nothing that can bo loo'ked. upon as assured when you are about to take a fly on an aeroplane. The voice put it tersely thus: “There’s a. lot of luck 'aboilt it. You’re in the hands of fate.”