Not as low as in some other photos here but this Mustang was called “Daisy Cutter” in the caption and, being published in early 1944, this was not a display for the public but possibly preparation for the ‘real thing’.

On 13 October 1938, a director of Lufthansa ((Carl August Von Gablenz) addressed the Lilienthal-Gesell- schaft fur Luftfahrtforschung in Berlin; the Lilienthal Society was concerned with aeronatical science. It was named after Otto Lilienthal who delivered a lecture on “The Theory of Bird Flight” in 1873. He and his brother were members of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (but only because there was no similar society in Germany).

Getting back to Von Gablenz, he gave a lot of information about Lufthansa’s operations in the pre-war period, including this map of the airline’s expansion. The area enclosed by the continuous line shows the geographical scope of its services in 1926. The line of dashes shows how much it had expanded its services by 1932.

The lines made up of dashes and dots shows the range of activities in 1938. The route going to the east was Berlin to Kabul (6310 Km).

Then there were the routes shown going west. The northerly one, Berlin – New York route (8234 Km), was via Lisbon and Horta.

There were two routes going south-west: Berlin – Natal in Brazil (9607 Km) and Berlin – Santiago de Chile (15,622 Km). In his lecture, he does not mention Lisbon (or any other intermediate stops, for that matter) for these two routes but I suspect Lisbon was a stopover of some kind.

Thanks once again, Adrian. At more or less the time as we’re talking about, changes were afoot.

On 5 April 1939, an American newspaper article headlined “Yankee Clipper Reaches England” was illustrated it with two photographs taken in Southampton the previous day. More than half the article, with the sub-heading “Picture Sent by New Method”, was spent describing the Western Union process. By this method, it took up to 20 minutes to transmit a 6″ x 7″ picture.

The other photograph transmitted was of the dignitaries; this is the one of Yankee Clipper (I suspect that modern scanning has rendered it in less good quality than it appeared in the original newspaper):

I hope you don’t mind my going way off topic but the same magazine presented me with another conundrum.

The photo below was taken in Rose Bay, Sydney and shows three Empire flying boats (G-AFCT, VH-ABB and G-AEUA (left to right). Fair enough but what’s that in the distant background, on the left of the photograph? The caption refers to “the Consolidated flying boat which is to be used for a survey flight across the Indian Ocean“. My reference books are all quite old but I assume this is the original ‘Guba’ (NC777). The book says that it arrived in Sydney on 12 April 1939 and left on 4 June 1939.

The conundrum is that the magazine is cover-dated April 1939. I realise that the magazine might not have been published on the 1st of the month but it was printed in England. If ‘Guba’ did arrive in Sydney on 12 April 1939, how long would it have taken for this photograph to have reached the UK?