Aeronautics: Sailing Storm Trooper

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If General Italo Balbo's 24 seaplanes had been not Italian but Japanese; if they had flown not across the Atlantic but eastward across the Pacific; if they had landed for a —goodwill" visit not at Chicago's lakefront but in Seattle's Puget Sound — they would have received a punctiliously polite welcome. But the average U. S. citizen would have felt about the same as the average Frenchman felt last month when Balbo's armada came roaring across the Alps out of Italy to blacken the skies of France. Last week France's Air Ministry an nounced a program to reassure her uneasy citizens. The French air force will stage a mass flight of its own. Twenty-two bombers will set out in October from Istres Airdrome in southern France. They will cross the Mediterranean to the west coast of Morocco, fly down the coast to the shoulder of Senegal, thence inland across the French Sudan, nearly to the Congo. Finally, north over the Sahara to the Mediterranean again, and home — 15,600 mi. in all. Volunteer officers & crew were called to begin training, at Istres. Like Balbo's men, they will be held strictly incommunicado until time to take off. Air Minister Pierre Cot, who only lately learned to fly, will not try to imitate Air Minister Balbo by leading the squadrons himself. General Joseph Vuillemin, chief of the air force in Morocco, will command. Weatherbound at Shoal Harbor on Trinity Bay, N. F. General Balbo announced last week that instead of following the North Atlantic route home via Ireland, he would head for the Azores and Lisbon.

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