Trans Atlantic Flight.

New York Times 100 years ago today, April 29, 1913:
Declared Impracticable with Present Type of Aeroplane.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    The present "fatal month" in aviation only emphasizes the fact that optimistic prizes for transatlantic flights by hydroaeroplanes are purely romantic. Spectacular flying has such a hold on popular fancy that we attribute to the aeroplane magic powers far beyond our present understanding of that machine. But technicians who really know the mathematics of the aeroplane realize that great size and absolute safety, inseparable from such a feat, demand reinventing the aeroplane. Its real magic — that it can go anywhere it pleases, unfettered by fences and "good roads" — loses its entire significance over the vast, free expanse of the ocean. Count de Lambert and some experts see this. At sea, the aeroplane's only advantage is greater speed, which unfortunately is linked with short range of action in any small, fast craft, because it must carry exceedingly high power; and its operators undergo a strain far greater than on any land or water vehicle. Even birds, whose instinctive use of the winds alone enables them still far to outstrip the aeroplane's speed and endurance, could not fly across the Atlantic without getting food from the sea and rest on the water.
    The notion that a hydroaeroplane can refuel from passing vessels is shortsighted. The few experts on sea navigation who comprehend the difficulties of fixing longitude and latitude in air-currents having a translocation or drift twice as rapid as sea currents understand why an aeroplane's nautical position cannot be reckoned with sufficient exactness to insure meeting vessels. For instance, a disabled hydroaeroplane, even though it could wirelessly give its exact astronomical position before it drops on the ocean, will be miles away from that reckoning when it reaches the surface of the sea. Apart from this consideration, it cannot interrupt its voyage in midocean unless the sea is as calm as a harbor. Actual experience settles that point. The German Navy's big load-carrying hydroaeroplanes have already demonstrated that in the least seaway they sink deeper and lose the poise to rise again. Ordinary rough waves wreck them. Their unwieldy "spars and sails" on a tiny boat hull are not feasible even in the North Sea. Consequently, these heavy machines will only be used near the coasts. Once down, in midocean, a hydroaeroplane is a tiny speck in immensity, with less chance of being picked up than a drifting lifeboat, since it will be wrecked if it attempts to make headway among the waves. Any ordinary ocean breeze will push it over on one side and inevitably sink it. Prof. Alexander Graham Bell is right when he demands that the trip must be made in one spurt. But the chance that any aeroplane motor in sight will work at full speed for forty, not to mention sixty, hours is not greater than the chance of a calm sea all the way across. No motor within our ken will stand up under such a spurt. A mammoth machine, with fuel for the whole distance, several pilots taking their turn at the wheel, and others constantly reckoning her position, will have a fair chance — if the motors hold out.
    With the present limit of resources, transatlantic prizes are about as logical as it would have been to induce Fulton's Clermont to attempt what only the Mauretania could have won. Let us hope that under the stimulus of Lord Northcliffe's recent prize those maker and pilots who have already "entered" their machines are more in earnest than the nature of the task permits many of us to believe. For then we will at least get, not an ocean-crossing, but a safe practical, everyday aeroplane that can accomplish more modest yet more, infinitely more, useful work.
                T. R. MacMECHEN,
                CARL DIENSTBACH.
        New York, April 18, 1913.