14,000 Miles Through the Air

"This is an interesting book which describes some of the challenges of flying from England to South Africa during the early age of aviation. It was disappointing in being only a bit over 50 pages. A better description of a similar flight is found in "The Flight of the Mew Gull" by Alex Hinshaw. You get a better appreciation of the problems faced at that time." - Amazon Reviewer

Popular passages

Page 19 - ... expressed — and expressed to an infinitely fine degree. A flying-machine is something entirely apart from and above all other contrivances of man's ingenuity. The aeroplane is the nearest thing to animate life that man has created. In the air a machine ceases indeed to be a mere piece of mechanism : it becomes animate and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually of expressing a pilot's temperament. The lungs of the machine, its engines, are again the crux of man's wisdom....‎

Page 126 - ... over us as we paid a silent tribute to those in far-off England for their sterling and honest craftsmanship. The successful issue of the venture in a great degree was due to them, and surely they merited and deserved a large proportion of the praise. Through every possible climatic rigor the Vimy had passed, and practically without any attention. Not once, from the time we took our departure from Hounslow, had she ever been under shelter. And now, as I looked over her, aglow with pride, the Vimy...‎

Page 17 - IN EARNEST We climbed slowly upward through the cheerless, mist-laden skies, our engines well throttled back and running perfectly. So as to make sure that all was in thorough working order, we circled for ten minutes above Hounslow, then set off. At 2,000 feet we suddenly emerged from the fog belt into brilliant sunshine, but the world below was lost to sight, screened by the dense pall of mist. Accordingly, we set a compass course for Folkestone, and just before reaching the outskirts a rift in...‎

Page 1 - Major - General Salmond was very proud of this achievement, for it demonstrated that the new arm of the service, the Royal Air Force, had begun to concentrate its efforts on peaceful developments and the establishment of longdistance commercial air routes. This was the longest flight that had ever been made up to this time, and it convinced me that a machine, properly attended and equipped, was capable of flying anywhere, provided suitable landing grounds existed.‎