AERONAUTICS: Arrived: D-1422

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Arrived: D-1422

In Manhattan's Customs House last week a large blond man in a blue suit and yachting cap stepped up to the chief clerk of the Collector of the Port, asked for a ship's manifest form. A moment later Capt. Wolfgang von Gronau took oath as master of the flying boat 0-1422, then bobbing at her moorings in the East River after a flight from northern Germany (TIME, Sept. 1). He registered too for his crew of three students from the Deutsches Verkehrs Fliegerschule (German commercial flying school of which he is chief): Eduard Zimmer, copilot; Franz Hack, mechanic; Fritz Albrecht, radioman.

In marked contrast to its unostentatious departure from the Isle of Sylt was the flying boat's spectacular arrival (from Halifax, N. S.) at New York. In mid-afternoon the great tandem-motored Dornier-Wal flew out of the northeast and over Manhattan's crowded Battery, twice circled the Statue of Liberty. Capt. von Gronau picked out one of the escort of police planes, followed it down to a landing in the midst of harbor traffic, deftly hurdled a menacing piece of driftwood, brought up within a stone's throw of the Battery seawall. The four men, in their five-year-old plane (which had already served the late Roald Amundsen in the Arctic and Capt. Frank Courtney in the Atlantic) had flown 4,670 mi. in 47 flying hours—nine days elapsed time.

Said Capt. von Gronau in the New York Times: "I had planned this flight [via Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Canada] for two years, but I did not tell Zimmer and Franz and Fritz until we reached Iceland because I did not wish the authorities to find out. . . . They would have stopped me because of the risk and other things, and so I just went. One must have some daring if one is to live one's dreams."

The plane and its crew flew on to Chicago for the national air races (see p. 47). With them as interpreter went their homeland friend, Fraulein Hertha Seelemann-Mirow, a pilot of the aviation department of the Hamburg-American Line. The return to Germany will be by steamer.

In Germany, meanwhile, the Transportation Ministry chose to smile upon the achievement "which will enhance German prestige throughout the world." It was learned that von Gronau actually had cabled from Iceland for permission to fly on westward. This request was immediately followed by a message saying he had taken off. At the captain's home in Warnemunde, headquarters of the school, Frau von Gronau, unable to snatch a moment's rest, despairingly ordered the telephone disconnected.

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