AERONAUTICS: Big Planes

Rabelais' jocose giant Pantagruel, under whose tongue a whole army once hid, might find the 500-ft. U. S. plane now being designed no wonder. But certainly the Arabian roc, which carried off elephants for its nestlings as an eagle rapes a mouse, would shy from the monstrous thing U. S. engineers propose to build for $5,000,000. Who the financiers are, who the builders, was kept secret. That it was a bona fide project Harry Westcott of Westcott & Mapes, Inc., New Haven and Manhattan engineering firm, testified immediately after Governor John H. Trumbull of Connecticut had predicted such a ship at a dinner of New Haven's august Union League Club. Westcott & Mapes are now estimating their bids on the structural work of not one, but two such planes. The builders expect that the first will be wrecked by the ineptitude of navigators with such a mighty machine. The lessons they learn in wrecking the first plane they can apply to flying the second. Each will have at least a dozen 1,000-h. p. motors, will be able to carry 500 passengers, 104 crew. Aerodynamic calculations suggest that they should be able to fly so high, so powerfully that reduced wind resistance will enable them to flit between Manhattan and London in six hours.

To these stupendities the present "biggest" planes already successfully flown are as hawks to eagles. They were designed by Claude Dornier,* Hugo Junkers, Adolph Rohrbach and Gianni Caproni respectively. (A German engineer, probably one of the three aforementioned, is the consultant on motive power for the U. S. ships.)