Aviation developments illustrated by increased activity last week and the request of the Allies to purchase duplicates of the latest American high speed army machines reveal the efforts to obtain mastery of the air in which superior design, performance, and, of course, production, are important factors. In spite of the vast improvements in the last year or so, or even the past few months, there are thousands of machines, once the finest in production, now entering a state of obsolescence, and the fastest models now in production will suffer the same fate in the near future as mechanical standards improve, Between the last war and the present the difference in machines and performances has been remarkable and probably represents the difference between existing types and the super-productions of the future. One of the first British aircraft types to come into operation on ihe Western front in the last war was the B.E. 2—beloved of all Royal Flying pilots, It had 70 h.p. Renault engine giving it a top speed of 70 miles an hour with a climb of 360 feet a minute, It performed marvels judged by those times, Geoffrey de Havilland established a height record of 10,560 feet in it, and Captain (now Air Vice Marshal Sir) C. A, H. Longeroft flew from Montrose to Farnborough, a distance of 450 miles, in 7 hours 40 minutes. It was only last year that in an ordinary service type Hawker Hurricane, used for comparison, that a pilot flew from Edinburgh to London in an hour and returned to Edinburgh for tea, The present Hurricane has five times the speed of the B.E. 2, a surface ceiling of at least 30,000 feet, has an engine fifteen times as powerful and climbs seven times as fast as this former
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.