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By writing to the authorities in these localities, Mr. Giddings also secured much valuable information for them as to present weather conditions and landing-fields information which was further supplemented by numerous special airway maps supplied by the Aero Club of America and similar aviation organizations in foreign countries.
Almost immediately preparations for the route were worked out, twenty-five airdromes and landing-fields were designated, of which the main ones would be at Cairo and Basra on the Tigris, with subsidiary fields at Marseilles, Pisa, or Rome, Taranto, Sollum, Bushire, Damascus, Bagdad, Bander Abbas, Karachi, Hyderabad, and Jodhpur.
The moment men were released from the war, surveying of this route was begun and tentative plans made for landing-fields every 200 miles over the 5,700-mile trip. The air is ours to do whatever we can with it. There must be developed a large interest in this country in the business of flying.
The actual flying time since leaving the Rockaway Naval Air Station was fifty-seven hours and sixteen minutes, and the average rate of flight was at a speed of sixty-eight nautical miles an hour. The immediate need, to establish aviation throughout the entire country, is a series of landing-fields from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast.
The speed and efficiency of airplane travel to and from New York and other cities is materially affected by the lack of landing-fields close to the business section of the city. There must be a large field, broad in every dimension, to permit the landing and taking-off of airplanes. A machine must get up flying speed running across the ground before it gets into the air.
At that time no attempt was made to obtain speed, as the purpose of the trip had been to locate landing-fields and make aerial maps for future transcontinental flights. The four planes that made this trip might be considered as the pioneers of vast flocks of airplanes which within a short time will be winging their way from coast to coast.
If, with machines built specifically for war purposes and with no special landing-fields or routes laid out, aviators could successfully travel from one coast to the other in fifty hours of flying-time, how much more rapidly will future trips be made when special touring-planes have been developed, routes and landing-fields are laid out, repair-shops are built, and the trip becomes a matter of routine rather than aerial experiments.
In the first place, they wished the route to be as close to the equator at all times as possible, so that their line of travel would approximate in distance the world's estimated circumference of 24,899 miles. In the second place, for stops they must choose cities or towns with either established landing-fields, or with grounds level enough for this purpose.
Landing-fields must be established and open to foreign planes, each nation providing some kind of reciprocal landing rights to other nations. Arrangements must be made so that if a monkey-wrench drops out of a plane a mile or two up in the air proper damages can be collected. For such things there is to-day but little precedent in law. This but sketches the problems.
These landing-fields should not be designed primarily for transcontinental flying-stations, but for city-to-city flying. There is going to be a great amount of aerial traffic from New York to San Francisco, to be sure, but the future of flying is in the linking up of cities a few hundred miles apart.
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