Aeronautics: Flights, Flyers

Engines. Last week Clarence Duncan Chamberlin marched into print with a charge that the increase in transport accidents since last summer was due to the inability of new twin-engined planes to take off and fly safely on one engine. Few nights later a twin-engined Curtiss Condor of American Airways, flown by Dean Smith, onetime Byrd antarctic pilot, had engine trouble between Buffalo and Detroit, flopped down, with nine passengers and a crew of three, upon the thinly iced surface of Lake St. Clair, near Windsor. Ont. With wheels retracted, the plane bumped through the ice while the lower wing supported the craft. Passengers and crew clambered atop the upper wing, huddled in the darkness until rescuers took them ashore.

Fastest. Howling tailwinds blew one United Air Lines transport from Chicago to Newark (736 mi.) in 3 hr. 17 min., another from Cleveland to Newark (411 mi.) in 1 hr. 41 min., fastest passenger flights on record.

Reward. French Flyers Codos & Rossi made a world's record distance flight last August from New York to Syria (5,700 mi.), in anticipation of a 1,000,000 fr. prize announced by France's youthful Air Minister Pierre Cot. Having mortgaged themselves up to the hilt to raise some 750,000 fr. for expenses, Heroes Codos & Rossi learned last week that the Government, economizing, had changed its mind about the prize.