The Hydroaeroplane.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 5, 1912:
Not Big or Strong Enough to Effect Ocean Flight.
To the Editor of The New York Times:
    In The Times Grahame-White announces his hope of crossing the Atlantic next year in a hydroaeroplane carrying six persons. We need not speculate on this flying colossus of the distant future.
    White's four 250 horse power motors do not exist. Engineers know that it will cost a fortune to design and experiment with this problem. The scientific French constructors of military aeroplanes find that without fundamentally new ideas their attempts to even double the size of our present machines borders on the impossible. Indeed, additional veneer and nickel plating was the only advance seen at the recent Aero Show at Paris.
    Some day, after spending more money than Maxim spent in 1892, we may devise a mammoth that can be made to fly. Its strength will remain unknown until it is tried out; it will probably go to pieces on its first flight. The untried multiplane still awaits prolonged experiment. Even with the multiplane's enormous lifting power, the ocean could not be crossed "in thirty hours." Such a machine's greater mass of framing meets resistance that causes it to lose all the advantage of the aeroplane's cutting edge. Our fastest small racing aeroplanes, with the same comparative carrying power as larger machines, have to be proportionately stronger. White's theoretical leap from Vedrine's racing Deperdussin (100 miles an hour) is even, more visionary than a slow machine that carries tons. And a huge machine, disregarding the drift of ocean air currents, is anything but "the simplest sort of straight flying."
    White proposes to alight on the ocean in a storm. Parseval, the German engineer, found that his large flying machine went to pieces in alighting on Lake Plau. Some 400 miles at sea the force of wind and waves is much greater than near the shore. Expert study of the hydroaeroplane shows that even the saltwater hydroplane is only adapted tor sheltered waters — and the hydroaeroplane is still an unsolved problem. White's hands will be full if he simply trys to build a moderately larger machine and attempts to fly it around the English coast.
                T. R. MACMECHEN,
                Agent Transatlantic Flight Expedition.
                New York, Dec. 2, 1912.