Word: cobham
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Secretary for Air Sir Samuel Hoare beamed over crystal and fine napery in London last week. Rising, he cast an eye about the Air Council assembled at luncheon to honor Alan Cobham, holder of the 28,000-mile world's record for long distance point-to-point-and-return flights-England to Australia and return. Clearing his throat, Sir Samuel Hoare announced that it had pleased His Brittanic Majesty to appoint Airman Cobham a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire...
Rising to a toast, Sir Alan Cobham said: "A man is never too old to fly. I will never give up flying until I am too old to crawl into my machine...
Meanwhile Sir Alan Cobham had been forced by a faulty spark plug to volplane to earth near Nuneaton. Deftly he skimmed beneath a high tension line carrying 6,000 volts. Then he discovered that he had no wrench with which to repair his motor. Vexed, he walked three miles until he found an autoist who loaned him a suitable wrench. His plane repaired, he sped to Manchester and civic glory. Meanwhile a Manchester crowd, informed by telephone of the contretemps, burst into incredulous laughter, refused for some minutes to believe that the great hero-airman of Britain could have come...
Said Pilot Cobham to the press: "It was my idea ... to show the people that there is no stunt about flying. . . . Aviation will make Australia. Instead of farmers being days away from each other they will become a matter of a half-hour or so by plane. ... In Australia it is possible to fly 365 days a year. An English pilot would regard flying in Australia as a rest cure...
...Elliott, who started from England with Pilot Gobham but died when a Bedouin rifleman, strolling on the bank of the Euphrates River, took a potshot "for sport" at the strange thing passing overhead. Not Sergeant Ward, either, who volunteered for Elliott's place and flew with Cobham from Arabia to Australia. It was one Captel, a mechanic who substituted for Ward in Australia for the flight home...