The Port of London Authority recently announced that the docks and warehouses bordering on the River Thames were to be improved and extended at a cost of £12,000,000. This progressive policy has been amply justified by the rapidly increasing traffic, and the latest returns show that last' year the volume of shipping broke all previous records-According to the annual report recently issued by the Port of London Authority, the total net register tonnage of vessels using the Port of London during the calendar year 1936 was over sixty-two million, which is an increase of two and a half million on 1935 and three and a halt million on 1934.
In order to avoid dislocation of traffic. the work of improvement has been carefully planned and will be carried out by sections. The expansion of Millwall Docks, and the erection there of new timber storage sheds has been taken in hand recently; reconstruction is also in progress at the Victoria Docks and at the West India Docks, The latter are the oldest docks built for handling cargo on the River Thames, but when the work has been completed they will be the most modern and the best equipped of their type in the world, At Canary Wharf, where the fruit boats are berthed, the whole quay is being widened for a distance of 620 feet in order to make room for new warehouses, and mechanical equipment is being installed which will unload bananas automatically and deliver them to lorries and railway vans, The complete development scheme provides for the building of a new graving dock, the improvement of roads and railways and the modernization of the 4,200 acres of dockland and 45 miles of quays of the Port of London: the transport of high officers, photography and survey, are tasks that the military autogiro might fulfil; at sea, its capacity for steep ascent and descent enables it to operate from a space on shipboard very little larger than is needed by a catapult.
Mr. Hafner, an Austrian engineer, appears to have carried the technique of gyroplane design and construction even beyond the pioneer achievements of Mr. de la Cierva. His first United Kingdom built machine, called the ANI single-seater, astonished the visitors to this year's S.B.A.C. Display, His company is now engaged on the construction of two cabin gyroplanes, one to carry two and the other three occupants, which are expected to take the air early in 1938.
Each of the new Air Ministry craft will derive power from a Siddeley Genet Major 160 lip. engine, which may be clutched in to the rotor for take-off. The wooden fuselage is planned as a monocoque shell, free of internal bracing members. "Jump" take-off is secured by an automatic change in angle of incidence of the rotor blades, When the pilot, after spinning up the vanes under engine power to a speed well above that obtaining in free flight, disconnects the engine from the rotor, the blades twist from the neutral "no lift" angle to an angle of pronounced lift, and the machine rises vertically till the rotor speed has decelerated to normal flying rate. In effect, the rotor automatically converts itself from a flywheel to a screw. In the Hafner gyroplane the pilot himself actuated a control which changes the angle of incidence of the blades to secure vertical take-off.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.