Aeronautics: Schneider Prelude

At Calshot, England, where British speed pilots were preparing for the Schneider Cup races against Italy and France on Sept. 12, a young lieutenant last week climbed into the cockpit of the Supermarine S-6, which won the Schneider Cup two years ago. He was Lieut. Gerald Lewis Brinton. 26, youngest member of the British Schneider Cup team. It was his first flight in the S-6.

The plane slid along the surface of the Solent until it was going about 200 m.p.h. It cleared the water for a second and then dropped back to it. A tower of spray shot up. The S-6 bounced 40 feet in the air and then plunged down into the Solent, nose first. When Lieut. Brinton's fellow officers reached the ship in a speedboat, it had risen again, upside down, with wings and tail torn off. The wreckage was towed ashore and the dead body of Lieut. Brinton removed from the tail of the fuselage, where the 'shock had wedged it. He was the eighth Schneider Cup pilot to be killed in Schneider Cup trials and elsewhere.*

The S-6 was not one of the planes which the British Schneider Cup team planned to race this year. Two new planes have been built, powered by Rolls-Royce motors, which are believed to be capable of achieving 400 m.p.h. In external design, they resemble the planes which won the Cup for England in 1929. The Italian planes, Macchi-designed, are intended to do better than 400 m.p.h.; each has two 1,500 h.p. Fiat motors, two propellers set in tandem. About the French planes, little is known except that they have been reported as surpassing 400 m.p.h. in secret trials. A British victory this year would give England permanent possession of the Schneider Cup.