The Curtiss Tanager, entrant in the Guggenheim Fund Safe Aircraft Competition, passed all its preliminary tests last week at Mitchel Field, L. I. It enters the finals with only one possible rival, a Handley-Page biplane similar in many respects to the Curtiss entry. Both planes have automatic wing slots. Frederick Handley Page has filed suit in Brooklyn for triple the amount of any prize the Tanager may win. He claims that the Curtiss plane is using wing slots on which he has a patent, without his warrant. The Curtiss company is expected to file counteraction claiming infringement of six basic patents by Handley Page in his ship. Both planes are biplanes, the Tanager a three-place enclosed ship with Curtiss Challenger 176 h.p. radial air-cooled motor. In addition to its slots, it has wing flaps, which vary the camber, or apparent thickness of the wing, and (the main feature) floating ailerons, which automatically assume a position parallel to air currents made by the plane in flight. The pilot can work the ailerons by hand as well, to effect lateral control of the plane, likewise the wing flaps. The plane has been designed to be put into immediate production with few changes in manufacturing methods now employed. Robert R. Osborn, project designer, speaking for the entire group of Curtiss engineers who jointly developed the Tanager in the Curtiss wind tunnel after two years' research, last week claimed that the floating aileron gives control at any angle of flight, adds non-stalling characteristics to the plane's performance, does not affect the life of the lower wing. The minimum performance requirements of the competition, included in the 18 preliminary tests which the Tanager successfully passed, are a high speed of 110 m.p.h., a minimum speed of 35 m.p.h., a rate of climb of 600 ft. per min. at sea level, a range of flight of 405 mi. at full throttle, an absolute ceiling (maximum altitude to which plane can travel) of 15,000 ft. By passing the preliminaries, the Tanager is entitled to a $10,000 prize. If it has no other competitor in the finals, it will take the first prize of $100,000 at the same time relinquishing the $10,000 prize.
Eielson Hunt
(See map )
A rough wall of wind frescoed with whorls of fog effectively blocked Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia, to flyers last week. Nor could boats cross under the wall, for clumps of ice, like polar lizards, skittered through from the Arctic Ocean southward. Yet it was becoming increasingly urgent that men get from the American to the Siberian side. Carl Ben Eielson was lost somewhere over there, with his mechanic Earl Borland. They had been missing since a flight Nov. 9. If living, their provisions, doled sparingly to each other, would have lasted two months.
Carl Ben Eielson, 32, is, perhaps was, general manager of Alaskan Airways. There are no regular air transport lines in the Peninsula. Alaskan Airways has bases at Nome, Anchorage, Fairbanks. It charters its planes for taxi and express service, using about 70 small government landing fields in summer and any patch of level snow in winter.