There was a time when a journey from London to Edinburgh was a real and lengthy adventure. It linked principal points between one country and another in a tiny little island measuring diagonally from Land's End to John O'Gronts 700 miles or so in a method regulated by coaching speed and afterwards railway speed. Expresses were introduced, travelling lime was reduced, stream-lined trains were created to kill the boredom of travel—although other countries have much longer hauls—but it still seemed a tremendous journey. On Thursday, Squadron-Leader J. W. Gillan, of the Royal Air Force, proved it was not so long and tedious. Using one of the new Hawker-Hurrican pursuit planes, of the ordinary standard service type now added to the R.AF., he left Edinburgh just after dusk and stepped out of his plane in London 48 minutes later, establishing a new speed record for land planes of 409 miles an hour, greatly exceeding any performance of a land machine previously established.—He covered a distance of 352 miles in a service plane at the rate of about seven miles a minute, flying "blind" most of the time because dusk had fallen and the speed flier of to-day must depend primarily on his instruments, not on his sense and intuition, As a flying feat it ranks as one of the greatest in the world, but it also indicates the great strides made in the re-equipment of the Royal Air Force to bring this unit into line with existing conditions, Re-armament has been forced on the world whether the leading nations desire it or not, and it is highly satisfactory to find that Britain, once fifth in the scale of air powers, has been able
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.