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BY PLANE TO EUROPE
[[flag- PORT WASHINGTON]]
[[image-black and white drawing of airplane flying across page]]
[[flag-PARIS]]
[[flag-MARSEILLES]]
[[flag-LONDON]]

[[column 1]]
HORTA
LISBON
MARSEILLES
PARIS
LVE--TODAY
ARR--TOMORROW

[[sticker]] EAGLE Brooklyn, N.Y. [[/sticker]]
Aviation Comes of Age
Passenger FLights Across Atlantic Begin Wednesday
But It'll Be Routine Stuff, Significant for Lack of Excitement
By WILLIAM WEER
[[box]] First Article in a Series [[/box]]
An extraordinary, historic event, with far-reaching significance for the future of mankind, will be launched at Port Washinton, L.I., next Wednesday afternoon, but it will cause only a phlegmatic ripple in the news channels of the world. 
At 3 p.m. Wednesday, on a vessel tied to a Port Washinton dock, the last warning cry will be repeated: "All ashore that's going ashore!" A gangplank will be
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quickly raised, a signal given--and an ocean liner will be off on the first regularly scheduled commercial airplane voyage across the north Atlantic. 
On board will be ten paying passengers with their baggage, a full crew, mail, freight and accommodations for 40 passengers in all-- [[strikethrough]]accommodations comparable [[/strikethrough]] to first-class passage on luxury liners which ply the Atlantic on the surface of the sea.

Without Fanfare
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the takeoff will be this very lack of excitement it will cause. The passengers themselves will, no doubt, look forward to a thrilling voyage, and some scores of friends will be there to see them off mingling with a few hundred others attracted as much by the prospect of seeing a celebrity or two as by anything else.
Missing will be the lure of dangerous adventure once associated with flying and particularly flying the Atlantic. No wondering now whether this plane that sets out from Long Island will reach its European destination, or even whether it will arrive on schedule. No lively speculation as to what surface ships are on the line of flight to go to the rescue should rescue be required. No worrying, except by executive officers whose duty it is to attend to such details, about interference by wind and weather. 

Mere Routine Now
Nothing but a routine, scheduled trip by an established business concern, Pan American Airways, even if the first trip in a series--dull stuff. Its success is taken for granted.
And yet here we have the reality of such stuff as prophets and poets and hardly dared dream of. When the Atlantic Clipper lands in Lisbon the day after taking off at Port Washinton it will me (1) that the north Atlantic, too, may now be flown by any citizen with the price, roughly, or a first-class passage on such liners as the Normandie and the Queen Mary, and (2) that anyone with the price may now circle the globe via Europe, Asia and North America, using only regularly operating airlines--in 16 days. 
[[column 3]]
Flying by plane, that is to say, has come of age. That's why we take it in unexcited stride, without clamor and hurrah. All that came before, during the half century or so of pioneering to bring on the present age of routine flying. 

Man in the Air
Thus back in the 1880s a German named Otto Lillienthal built a crude box-kite affair and, hanging from it by precarious finger hold, made gliding flights over the landscape--nearly 1,000 of them--until an accident killed him. LIllenthal had ambitious dreams of a time to come when man should fly like the birds, and he had even planned to install an engine and propeller to make his wooden kite fly regardless of the wind. But few believed in his dreams and he himself had no faint conception of the luxury liners that would ride the air over the Atlantic in 1939.
In December of 1903 on a sand dune at Kitty Hawk, N.C., a young bicycle mechanic named Wilbur Wright, with a wooden box kite to which he had attached a propeller driven by a gas engine, held on for dear life as it bumped over the ground, rose and flew--actually flew--a distance of 120 feet in the estmated time of 12 seconds. This was the real birth of that aviation which has now become routine matter by land and sea and the air over both.
But again those present at the birth and those who heard about it had no faint idea that the lusty youth and adult the puny baby would grow into. THe story is told that a native Carolinian, yey witness of the Wright flight, ran five sandy miles back to the main street of Kitty Hawk, shouting in breathless syllables to passing villagers:
"They done it! They done it! Danged if they ain't flew!"
There is internal evidence, such as the non-Carolinian dialect of the quotation, that the tale is apocryphal, with an ex-post-facto origin in New England. In any case, it is on record that the rest of the world remained calm over this first demonstration that the race of man had found its wings. A reporter who telegraphed a brief account of the goings-on to his New York newspaper was severely reprimanded for wasting toll charges on a petty item which the editor suspected he had thought up, and it was two days later, on Dec. 19, that the first 
[[column 4]]
report of the flight was printed--half a dozen lines on page 5 of the New York Tribune. THose who read it promptly passed on to more important matters.
Other wooden box kites were made and improved, with gas engines and propellers perfected, and there came a time in June, 1927, when a young man called Charles A. Lindbergh lifted one of them from [[pencil underline]] the rain-wet grass of Roosevelt [[/pencil underline]] Field, headed east by northeast and touched ground again a day and a half later on the outskirts of Paris, France.
By that time something like full realization of what was happening had percolated among the masses of men. The emotional stir of Lindbergh's flight all over the world, the unprecedented crowds that turned out to see him wherever he went, the vast interest in every detail of his movements--all that was in part a tribute to the sheer drama of his gorgeous one-man achievement. 
But in part it was also a recognition of the larger achievement in the making. Lindbergh's flight was in itself of no practical value. It carried only plane and pilot across the Atlantic. Despite the beautiful precision of it, no one was under the delusion that tomorrow another flier could take another and hop, on schedule, to Paris. And even less could a passenger hire Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis to take him across.
And yet one man had done it, and it became suddenly clear that sooner or later planes would be hopping the difficult Atlantic daily with their quota of passengers. The cheering was in good part for that--cheering in 1927 for the clippers of 1939.

'Lindy' Predicted 10 Years
Lindbergh himself guessed it would take ten years before regular airplane service across the Atlantic was a fact. The talk at that time was of artificial islands to be floated in midocean to be used for refueling. The thought was of uncomf0rtable small planes like Lindbergh's, with less gasoline space to make room for passengers.
It took 12 years instead of 10, and without the floating islands. And instead of a small single-motored land plane loaded to the ears with gasoline the Atlantic clippers of 1939 are all-metal flying boats, weight 41 1/2 tons each, with [[last line cut off]]

[[column 5]]

with vast, roomy wings that carry gasoline; corridors, sitting room for 72 passengers, sleeping accommodations for 12, card rooms nd writing rooms--boats that fly at an average of 155 miles an hour and cross the ocean in less than 30 hours. A one-way ticket is $375, round trip $675, as against the minimum $321 and $642 for first-class passage on such surface liners as Normandie and Queen Mary--an the time of travel is almost a week less by air.
This is something to cheer about--and even more so, because it is so well established, even at the outset, that it is taken for granted, without cheers.

First Passengers Had Tough Time, But It's Just an Overnight Hop Now
By WIlliam Weer
[[pencil underline]]The first passenger [[/underline]] on a transatlantic plane flight had an uncomfortable time of it. Charles A. Levine was his name, a now forgotten hero of the heroic and reckless year of 1927, when many tried to fly the oceans and a few survived. Levine was a synthetic passenger, having earned his place behind Pilot Clarence D. Chamberlin by buying the plane.
[[box]] Second Article In a Series [[/box]]
Passenger Levine did not know, while he flew, where he would land or whether he would land alive anywhere. He stayed awake with the pilot and relieved him for brief periods at the controls. Food consisted of a sandwich and a chocolate bar and he had less room to move about in than a Sing Sing prisoner in his cell. 
It is a far cry from that to the paying passengers who, tomorrow afternnor, board [[pencil underline]] the Atlantic Clipper [[/underline]] at Port Washinton for the first trip of a regular commercial airline passenger service to Europe.