Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1926-02-18
CRUSADING WITH EXAGGERA-
TiONS

Colonel Mitchell turns from the
court martial and his resignation
from the Army to crusading in
aeronautics. He will address. directly
and indirectly, many thousands of
people, who have not had opportunity
to know from experience much about
the subject; they, or many of them,
doubtless will assume that the
Colonel will not make statements
which he would be unable to sub
stantiate. So they may be led into
error and the making of wrong con-
illusions likely to bewilder rather
than to inform.
aeronautical engineering. M. I. T.,
contributes to the Boston Tran
script an article on William
Mitchell, Special and Spacious Plead
err" One has no difficulty in gather
ing from this that he regards the
Colonel an unsafe guide on this sub
ject of aeronautics, although he eX-
presses his conclusions in very mild
language.
The writer makes quotations from
the Colonels interviews and from the
books he has written and suggests
some very pertinent criticisms. We
quote from the article:
"Among the first things to strike
one making a dispassionate analysis
of all this material is the extreme
holiness of Colonel MitchelfS state
ments on technical points within the
domain of the aeronautical engineer.
OF course he is not an engineer or
an airplane designer, and never mas
been, but the American public Is
over-prone to assume that man
who has had wide experience with
one side Of a subject must know all
about every side. Even with full al
lowance for a lack of technical train
ing it is startling to encounter In
.'Winged Warfare" such explicit mis-
statements as that I'VE have
climbed to attitudes of forty -four
thousand feet and can go still high
err" "a practical helicopter has been
developed which has risen vertically
and travelled from one point to an
other" and 1.-The airship has the
greatest cruising radius OF any
known means of transportation. TINS
of course. includes seacraft on wa
ter. ~. :"
"These are not matters about
which there can be any difference OF
opinion, or about which opinions
count one way or the other. They are
matters of statistically recorded fact.
The worlds record for altitude, made
in q machine built for that purpose
alone and having no military or COM
mercial function, stands at little
under forty thousand feet. A new
machine, also constructed for the sole
purpose of setting an altitude record.
has been undergoing preliminary
tests which suggest that it may at
tain a height little in excess of
forty thousand. No military airplane
now in use in any country, so far as
the writer has been able to discover,
comes within eight thousand feet of
that figure. AT for the helicopter,
one has risen vertically to a height
of twenty feet and travelled a little
over half a mile at an average speed
of some ten miles an hour. AS to
whether or not that performance
justifies the adjective practical
each reader may judge for himself.
To maintain that airships, which
have never exceeded 500 miles dis
lance in single flight have a longer
cruising radius than seacraft which
serve trade routes longer than that
without taking on fresh supplies
quite as a matter of course is so
absurd that it is difficult to believe
that anyone expects the statement to
be taken seriously. He main
tains that a certain European Power
has a pursuit airplane capable of a
speed of 30 miles an hour, or some
forty miles in excess of anything in
this country. but fails to mention
that the design was one in which
performance was given priority over
everything else and in which little
attention was afforded those mill
tary qualities, the vital importance
of which Colonel Mitchell quite
justifiably stresses elsewhere. 1t
might have been added that a Europ-
can nation has an observation air
plane capable of approximately 1So
miles an hour in speed and that 1t Is
equipped with an engine built In
America and with a propeller built
on license from an American inven-
tori