Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-08-27
FLIGHT REALIZES LIFE AMBITION.
GRONAU SAYS IN WRITING STORY
fcontinued Prom First page.l

Continued From First Page.)
such gear as that. And then, in the
| pilots cockpit, thinner and I sat side
by side. I made all the landings and
| took the stick at the take-offs, too, be-
cause there is only one throttle, and
1t is on my side. Back of the pilot IS
cockpit was a little place where / kept
my navigating gear-the navigating
over and had to use the pilots cock
pit to take my sights I took along a
bubble sextant, lots of charts-but not
enough, as found out-and four COM
passes. Three of them were magnetic
and one was an earth inductor COM
pass, which behaved very well.
Between the navigator's cockpit and
the radio cockpit, further aft in the
hull, Is the tank room, where we kept
the gasoline. We could only crawl
through there, SO we rugged up some
wires and q carrier so that I could
send messages to Fritz without moving
from the forward part of the plane.
Fritz had his sending and receiving
gear back there, wind-driven gem
orator for the sending set and an
auxiliary petrol-driven generator.
Franz Hack, our mechanic, spent his
time In the tank room or in helping
Fritz, and every hour, as have said,
he could climb up to the great motors
and look them over.
Aides Unaware Of Momentous Venture.
We trained for the flight by a pre-
liminary three-day trip to Stockholm,
Finland, and other places in the Baltic.
But, of course, thinner and the others
didn't know We were going through
other than routine training then, for
the school sponsors every year long
distance flights as a part OF its i'm
struction. thinner is a student at my
school and the other two are, like me,
part Of its staff.
You see, didn't want the authorities
to know, because they would have
stopped me because Of the risk and
other things, and so just went. One
must have some daring If one Is to live
ones dreams.
We left List. our little flying village
on the Isle of Sylt, in the North Sea,
last Monday morning-just nine days
ago. can hardly yet believe It; it
seems more like months. In AZ hours
OF flying we have sailed over 1000
nautical miles; over ice and angry
waters, over Greenland and those
other countries had only read about,
and now at last we are here, and 1t
Is warm again, almost too warm.
When We left Sylt we shot along
over the North Sea with pretty fair
weather conditions and a strong tail
wind which made the quickest lap of
our journey, about 700 miles in six
ana o half hours. We had often
hopped over to the Farce Islands, and
/ knew little cove there called Tran
seSvaag, where we had stored some
petrol. 1t was raining very, very hard
when we came there, so there was moth
ing we could do but just set the plane
down on the water, cover up the motors
as best we could with some canvas
tarpaulins and wait for it to stop. We
stayed there over night and on Tuesday
We took off for Reykjavik
Flew Through Heavy Fog.
We started in clear weather, but we
had not gotten far before we ran into
mighty fog bank lying before us and
going up very high. It Is strange flying
into fog. At first, just for a moment,
there Is always an uncomfortable feel
ing, but then one gets used to 1t.
We few through fog for hours, and
Fritz kept getting messages from ships
and stations reporting q head wind.
always want to get down when there
is q head wind, for the wind is usually
not so strong near the sea. So we
came very low and could see that the
sea was very rough, but there was no
head wind. All the way to Iceland we
kept getting messages reporting head
winds and we had tail wind all the
way. About six hours we we're in the
fog and then suddenly all was clear
and we saw the island before us.
Great white snow mountains, strangs-
~ shaped, fxuck up from the rocky
coast, ard inland we saw the foaming
hot springs and the steam from the
boiling water. The clouds OF steam
were yellow and white; the yellow ]
suppose, came from the sulphur springs.