ar per mile. By March of 1919 the cost per mile
had gone up to 1.28 dollars; the first annual report issued at the
end of May showed an efficiency of 95.6 per cent and the original
six aeroplanes and engines with which the service began were still in
regular use.

In June of 1919 an American commercial firm chartered an aeroplane for
emergency service owing to a New York harbour strike and found it so
useful that they made it a regular service. The Travellers Company
inaugurated a passenger flying boat service between New York and
Atlantic City on July 25th, the fare, inclusive of 35 lbs. of luggage,
being fixed at L25 each way.

Five flights on the American continent up to the end of 1919 are worthy
of note. On December 13th, 1918, Lieut. D. Godoy of the Chilian army
left Santiago, Chili, crossed the Andes at a height of 19,700 feet
and landed at Mendoza, the capital of the wine-growing province of
Argentina. On April 19th, 1919, Captain E. F. White made the first
non-stop flight between New York and Chicago in 6 hours 50 minutes on
a D.H.4 machine driven by a twelve-cylinder Liberty engine. Early in
August Major Schroeder, piloting a French Lepere machine flying at a
height of 18,400 feet, reached a speed of 137 miles per hour with a
Liberty motor fitted with a super-charger. Toward the end of August, Rex
Marshall, on a Thomas-Morse biplane, starting from a height of 17,000
feet, made a glide of 35 miles with his engine cut off, restarting it
when at a height of 600 feet above the ground. About a month later R.
Rohlfe, piloting a Curtiss triplane, broke the height record by reaching
34,610 feet.

XXII. 1919-20

Into the later months of 1919 comes the flight by Captain Ross-Smith
from England to Australia and the attempt to make the Cape to Cairo
voyage by air. The Australian Government had offered a prize of L10,000
for the first flight from England to Australia in a British machine, the
flight to be accomplished in 720 consecutive hours. Ross-Smith, with his
brother, Lieut. Keith Macpherson Smith, and two mechanics, left Hounslow
in a Vickers-Vimy bomber with Rolls-Royce engine on November 12th and
arrived at Port Darwin, North Australia, on the 10th December, having
completed the flight in 27 days 20 hours 20 minutes, thus having 51
hours 40 minutes to spare out of the 720 allotted hours.

Early in 1920 came a series of attempts at completing the journey by air
between Cairo and the Cape. Out of four com