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being well within the range of probability. When one reflects that, within the last year, the maximum speed has been from one hundred and seventy to two hundred and forty miles per hour, it seems useless to define the limits of aircraft performance as regards speed. In this regard, aerial navigation is comparable with travel on water rather than with travel on land, maximum speeds being also average speeds in the case of steamship, though this is not the case with land locomotion. In addition to its other advantages, high speed of aerial travel is the soundest engineering because it admits of sustaining the heaviest loads upon the smallest surfaces. Another and imperative reason for speed is of course to overcome adverse winds. To progress against wind, speed higher than the highest of winds may be required. At present, the limit of wind velocity with which it is possible to battle is determined only by conditions of starting and landing.
     As for the possible radii of action, that is, the maximum distances of travel without return to a base of descent to earth for additional supplies of fuel, lubricant, etc., it is evident at the outset that the greater the radius the greater the utility. The new record for endurance just established by the Fokker monoplane of thirty-five hours during which flight, twenty nine hundred miles were flown, is distinctly informing as to the capabilities of the present day machines and gives us somewhat of a criterion by which to judge the future. Louis Brequet, the eminent French engineer and constructor, has made bold to predict the advent of a plane capable of carrying two hundred passengers at a speed of seven hundred miles per hour on a sustained flight of twenty six thousand miles, a distance equal to that around the world. 

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