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Thea Rasche, comely, 27-year-old German fraulein, skilled and licensed "stunt" flyer, dropped into Paris last week in her small sport plane with 100-h. p. Flamingo motor. Her father, a wealthy brewer of Essen, and Mr. Levine of Chamberlin fame, had promised her sufficient funds to go to the U. S. and try to be the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She planned to use a U. S.-built plane. She said: "I have a very robust constitution .... I am capable of accomplishing such an undertaking."
Gladys Roy, U. S. aviatrix, left Cleveland last week to fetch a Ryan monoplane from San Diego, Calif. Her object: ". . . to fly the Atlantic before any other woman gets a chance. . . ." Her objective: Rome. Her backers: Minneapolis businessmen.
Reéné Fonck, Frence ace, whose transatlantic Sikorsky crumpled and burned last year on Long Island, watched another Sikorsky approach completion on Long Island and made plans for a Paris flight next month. The new ship was built with perforated flat strips of duralumin instead of the tubing now popular at many factories. Engineer Igor Sikorsky said: "There is no way to tell what is going on inside a tube. There may be a dangerous erosion. . . ."
Gotthard Strohschein, whilom Chicago preacher but now an inventor in Jersey City, declared that he had leased a site on Staten Island where he would build an all-metal biplane having a 115-foot wingspread, two 1,000-h. p. steam turbines, storage space for 500 gallons of crude oil and 1,000 gallons of water. This steam machine, he said, would be able to pick up two pilots, a mechanic, an observer and eight passengers. It could and would, he said, fly from New York to Europe in 18 or 20 hours.
Lloyd W. Bertaud, U. S. mail flyer, original colleague of Pilot Chamberlin for his transatlantic flight, announced that he would try flying from Long Island to Rome (4,300 miles) next month in a Fokker monoplane with 480-h. p. Bristol Jupiter motor (air-cooled). Pilot Bertaud's backer was Publisher William Randolph Hearst.
Frank T. Courtney, British aviation captain, was busy last week at Calshot, England, seeing the last touches—spark-plug scraping, compass adjustments—put to a "Whale" seaplane built by the Dornier factory at Friedrichshafen, Germany, in which he meant to fly the Great Circle route from Ireland to the Battery, Manhattan, with a stop at Newfoundland to refuel, relax. The flight was to demonstrate the superiority of seaplanes for transoceanic travel. Seaplane enthusiasts see no reason for risking forced water landings, like the America's at Ver-sur-Mer, in land machines.