Regular mail service by air post between Paris and Geneva was established on May 26th, when the Swiss airman, Durafour, made the trip of two hundred and fifty miles in five and one-half hours, including half an hour's forced landing on French soil because of fog.

A British airplane company announces that it has been offered a carriage rate of five dollars an ounce for transporting from Shanghai to London certain essences used in the manufacture of perfumes.

Airplane lines for the regular transportation of merchandise between Brussels and Paris have been established. Five hundred pounds of lobsters constituted the cargo of the first plane to make the flight from Paris.

Regular daily newspaper delivery by airplane was inaugurated last May by the London Daily Mail, which sent packages of its Manchester edition to Carlisle, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Montrose by the air route. The papers are dropped from the 'planes in bundles attached to parachutes. The regular railroad time between Manchester and Aberdeen is thirteen hours, ten minutes; the newspaper 'plane makes it in three hours and a half.

At Johannesburg, South Africa, a commercial aviation company has been formed for the purpose of establishing passenger and express service between that city and Pretoria, Maritzburg, Durban, and Cape Town.

Australia has already established a transcontinental airway, from Sydney 2,550 miles across country to Port Darwin on the north coast. Landingstations and relay and fuel depots have been established at distances of 390 miles apart. The survey by airplane of an alternative interior route has been begun.

It is 1,135 miles from Calcutta to Simla (a distance that strikes the American who knows India only from the maps in his school-books with a distinct shock of surprise). The railway fare, first class, is a little more than £8. And, as every reader of Kipling and Flora

Annie Steele knows, it is a long, hot, tiresome journey. But now, or very shortly, one may literally fly from the stifling heat of the Hoogli flats to the cool hills of the "Plain Tales" in a third of the time and for less than twice the money. The newly organized commercial aviation company of India, with three million pounds sterling of capital, projects a Calcutta-Simla passenger-line that will cut the distance to 950 miles and make the trip in twelve to fifteen hours as against the forty-two hours which the train takes, for a fare of £15 17s. This route will be flown via Delhi; another line will run from Calcutta to Bombay, another from Calcutta to Darjeeling, and a fourth from Calcutta to Puri, the average fare being sixpence per mile.

The St. Maurice Valley Forest Protective Association, with the co-operation of the Canadian government, has established an airplane forest-fire patrol.

Even as the proof of this article is being revised comes the cabled report of the airplane "timber cruisers,” twenty men with three machines, back from a month's exploration of two million square miles of Labrador timber and pulp-wood lands, with sketches and photographic maps revealing millions of dollars worth of accessible wealth as yet untapped.

One of the largest American aircraft manufacturers recently received a request for prices from the Congo Mission of the Disciples of Christ, which proposes to replace its fleet of steam-launches with flying-boats, the better to spread the gospel among the natives of the Belgian Congo. Half a dozen other foreign mission stations have also made similiar inquiries. "Sky-pilot" may soon be more than a mere figure of speech to the natives of many lands.

Lord Northcliffe, whose offer of a $50,000 prize was one of the stimuli of the men who undertook to fly across the Atlantic last spring, was quick to see the possibilities of closer Anglo-American relations which the flight in sixteen hours of Alcock and Brown from Newfound

land to Ireland opened up. "A warning to cable monopolists," he termed the feat, adding that the voyage was quicker than the average time of press messages in 1919. "I look forward with certainty," he said, "to the time when the London morning newspapers will be selling in New York in the evening, allowing for the difference between British and American time, and vice versa in regard to the New York evening newspapers reaching London the next day. Then we shall no longer suffer from the danger of garbled quotations due to telegraphic compression. Then, too, the American and British peoples will understand each other better, as they are brought into closer daily touch."

So far we have been talking about airplanes. The successful transatlantic round trip of the R-34 is the most convincing evidence that in the discussion of aerial transportation the dirigible balloon must not be forgotten. In fact, the only important commercial use of aircraft prior to the European war was the system of passenger-carrying Zeppelins. Immediately upon the signing of the armistice the Germans resumed the operation of passenger service by Zeppelins. Regular voyages on a fixed schedule between Berlin and Constantinople, via Munich and Vienna, have been made for several months.

Announcement was made in June of the formation of a combination of British airship interests, with several million pounds sterling available capital, for the establishment of airship lines literally encircling the earth. Moderate-sized dirigibles (there ought to be a better word for this craft) are being built for carrying express and mail matter, together with passengers; for long-distance flights carrying no cargo but passengers, ships of large size and high speed will be used; equally large craft, with lower engine power and slower speed, but large carrying capacity, will be constructed for general freight purposes. The largest of these airships yet planned is to have a cubic capacity of 3,500,000

feet, or nearly twice that of the R-34; it is expected to carry fifteen tons of passengers and mail for a distance of 4,500 miles at a speed of sixty miles an hour. The first of these new ships will be of 1,250,000 cubic feet capacity.

These are hard-headed British business men, who are preparing to stake their millions on the feasibility of operating airship routes from London to the four corners of the earth. Two main lines across the western ocean are planned; a London-New York route either direct or via Lisbon and the Azores, and a London-Rio Janeiro route, via Lisbon and Sierra Leone. Tickets (at £1,000) from London to Rio and return are already on sale for the first voyage. Schedules of two days and a half to New York, seven days to Perth, Australia, five days and a half to Cape Town, four days to Rio, a day and a half to Cairo-these are the space-ignoring, time-destroying details of this gigantic project.

To travel by airship over a shrunken world will not be as expensive as traveling about New York in a taxicab; ten cents a mile, against thirty; £50 from London to New York; threepence-halfpenny to send a letter. These are the tariffs already announced; that they will eventually be reduced is not to be doubted.

I have tried to indicate with the utmost brevity some of the things the rest of the world is doing in commercial aviation. These involve big plans and big figures. So far in America, the land of the airplane's nativity, nothing approaching these foreign achievements and projects in any important way has been undertaken or even seriously planned, with the sole exception of the United States aerial mail service.

By the time this is printed the air mail service in the United States, first established in the spring of 1918 between Washington and New York, and later extended to Cleveland and Chicago, will be in operation as far west as Omaha and St. Louis. Large, multi-motored air

'planes, especially constructed for the postal service, are to be built and ready for operation early in 1920. These big 'planes will make non-stop runs between Washington and New York, New York and Cleveland, etc., serving cities lying along their routes by dropping mail matter in packages attached to parachutes and possibly picking up mail-pouches from specially devised holders, on the same general principle as that by which fast through mail-trains pick up pouches with their mail-catchers.

That the aerial post pays, not merely in the saving of time, but in actual dollars and cents, has been fully demonstrated by the first year's experience of the Washington-New York service. The actual postage revenue for the year on this route was $159,700; the saving in railway transportation was $2,264, making a total revenue of $161,964. The cost of operation was $137,900, to which must be added a charge for the loss of one 'plane, less the useful parts salvaged, amounting to $4,961-a total operating cost of $142,861 and a surplus of $19,103.

These results have been achieved with 'planes which were not built for mail transportation nor really well adapted. to it. They are army 'planes, slightly altered for the use of the Post Office Department. Possessing high speed in the air, they are able to carry only 400 pounds of mail matter at a time, while their excessively high landing speed not only makes their operation risky, both to pilot and to mail matter, but compels landings in large open fields which naturally are not to be found close to important post-offices. The exception to this last-named condition is Chicago, where the great open space along the downtown Lake-front, Grant Park, makes an ideal landing-place almost within stone'sthrow of the Post Office. Mr. Praeger reported on June 22d that fifty-eight consecutive trips had been made between Cleveland and Chicago without delays, forced landings, or engine trouble. These flights, moreover, were made in weather which a short time ago would

have been regarded as prohibitive of flight. Once when a squall so severe as to tie up shipping in Chicago Harbor was raging the mail-'plane got through on schedule, with its 16,000 letters (an average of forty letters to the pound). The release of a railway-mail distribution-car between these two points saves $52,000 a year. In view of figures like these, and the capacity of 1,000 pounds and upward which the new mail-'planes will have, the recent reduction of the aerial postage to two cents an ounce, the same as charged for all other means of transportation, seems unlikely to bring about a deficit in the Air Mail Service.

In the first year of the American postal air service, which began on May 15, 1918, not a single mail-airplane fell and not one of the Post Office pilots was killed. This was in a total of 128,000 miles of flying, in all sorts of weather. Out of 1,261 scheduled trips only fiftyfive were not undertaken because of weather conditions; this in spite of the fact that expert airmen, formerly in the Army Air Service, have denounced the type of 'plane used on the postal routes as unsafe except in the best weather.

Of course American airmen and aircraft manufacturers have not been idle since the armistice was signed. In the three months ended on August 1, 1919, American airplane manufacturers reported orders booked and in process of construction for more than 500 'planes, while fully 500 more serious inquiries had been received; every manufacturer in America was months behind his orders, the largest of them having had to put on both day and night shifts at two factories. Anything that will fly can be sold; the range of orders runs from single-passenger machines to those with a capacity of ten or more. One enterprising manufacturer advertises that owners of his make of flying-boats are taking in from $600 to $1,000 a day, carrying passengers on pleasure rides at high fees. On the other hand, the amateur mechanic can buy the necessary parts, with accompanying blue-prints, for the con

struction of his airplane, for two or three hundred dollars. For motive power he can buy a Ford engine-yes, the same that propels the despised but ubiquitous Tin Lizzie-modified for aviation purposes, for a matter of $350! They fly, too, these Ford-motored aircraft, and give promise of becoming so numerou along the air lanes that special regulations will have to be promulgated to keep them from messing up important traffic.

And we are using aircraft in many non-military ways here in America. Aerial observation as a means of detecting forest fires was begun in the spring of 1919 by the establishment of a lookout in a captive balloon at the United States Army Balloon School at Arcadia, California, on the edge of the Angeles National Forest. With his field-glasses the observer commands a view of more than 2,500 square miles of forest area. By means of map and compass he is able to determine with great accuracy the location of any smoke that seems to be more than that from a traveler's camp-fire. The telephone at his hand gives him instant communication with the Forest Service headquarters at Los Angeles, which in turn can at once call by telephone the fire-fighting unit nearest to the scene of trouble.

Regular air passenger service between New York and Atlantic City was established in the summer of 1919.

The Apache Aerial Transportation Company advertises an hourly service in both directions between Los Angeles and San Diego, with four new twelvepassenger airplanes.

Utah capitalists have organized a company which will operate a line of sightseeing airplanes from Salt Lake City, piloted by former "Aces" of the Army Flying Corps. It is planned to make accessible to tourists in this way hundreds of natural wonders and beautiful vistas which are otherwise almost inaccessible.

Here is a newly established advertising agency, its officers all former offi

VOL. CXL.-No. 836.-25

cers of the U. S. Air Service, announcing a complete service of aerial advertising, including sky-high display on dirigible, kite, and spherical balloons and airplanes, the dropping of souvenirs and handbills from the air and aerial photographing of cities, summer resorts, country places, real estate developments, etc.

One American newspaper, The Brooklyn Eagle, has begun in an experimental way the delivery of its papers to Long Island points by airplane. Newspapers that undertook to transport photographs of the Dempsey-Willard fight at Toledo on July 4th to New York by airplane did not achieve the results they hoped for, but the pictures were actually delivered, in spite of breakdowns and accidents, many hours earlier than trains could have transported them. An enterprising Toledo newspaper distributed its "extra" editions, with news of the fight, over a seventy-mile radius by airplane.

A Utica newspaper has made arrangements for delivering its papers to distant points in the Adirondacks by airplane.

Airplane passenger service was established last summer between San Antonio and several other Texas cities and Ardmore, Oklahoma, with a prospect of its extension to Denver and Kansas City.

An enterprising Chicago firm of clothing manufacturers, specializing in clothes for college boys, has established its own aerial delivery service, under the direction of a former army flyer, which includes all of the colleges and universities within a hundred-mile radius of the city on its regular delivery routes.

Guiding fishing craft by radio communication to the location of schools of fish is an odd job for the airplane, but this service, inaugurated by the navy last summer at Gloucester, proved such a saver of the time and money of the Gloucester fishermen that it is to be extended to other coasts. Flying at an elevation of 3,000 feet, the observer in a seaplane can see the mackerel or cod a hundred feet or more below the surface. The use of aerial photography as a