Judge — August 3, 1929 — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JUDGE Flying Fools Roosevelt Field Wilmer Stultz, a grand pilot, went up in gay spirits, broke all rules by A stunting at three hundred fe« killing himself and two passengers. in the same locality an amateur went into a nose div and was killed. Jack Ashcraft, flying with Viola Gentry, fell and was killed for the si ly reason that their plane ran out of gas. In New Jersey tw lost the: to fly “Jenny apped in the Phe same week men lives trying a wing sn ina plane that was not re So the wretched story runs. ue, as Colonel Boots s: accidents “violations of those principles which we definitely know can make flying These are vs, to safe.” The Department of Commerce state that “the human equation remains the cause of about half of our accidents.” The wreck in the English Channel—the first the Imperial Airways have ever had—in which persons were drowned, due to engine But it occurred in a plane which, altho: two motors, could not fly motor dead, which furthermore was not built to land on the wate which it had to cross. As Harry F. Guggenheim ays, every passenger plane should have two or more seven was failure, with one gines and should be capable of flying with one dis- As to the abled, investigs of a member of the year old is obsolete. Thus it all comes back to the violation of known principles. There ix something ominous in the fig- ures which show that in the first half of this y the number of student permits granted in this coun- try was four times as gi) as in the first half of last year; the number of pilots granted licenses more than doubled. Congestion at some fields is getting serious, resulting in collisions in the air and risky landings. Aviation schools are not thoroughly under control, Flying for sport is getting to be a fad. Un- licensed amateurs and obsolescent planes are oper- ating with impunity in some states. Mr. Guggenheim points out that on our regular passenger services using multi-engined planes over organized airways, 44,650 passengers have been carried with only one accident resulting in death or injury. And that one was caused by another plane “metal fatigue” which the British there is point in the remark rministry that “every plane a nd crashed, doing stunts and actually running into the passenger plane. Too many flying fools are taking the many pli going up that should n the ground. What aviation needs right now more rapid development, oy is not but more rigid discipline. Spoiling Genius TT week brings to a climax the bombilation with vhich Thomas A. Edison has been picking a young genius to carry on his work. forty-eight youths nominated by prominent ientists and examined by questionnaire, he is pick- ing one to study under a four-) of the forty-seven losers, we set, not to mention a dance, : sceing tour of New York and will probably do them more I Turning the spotlight on one youth as a potential genius is more generous than wise. But the lying idea, like the Johns Hopkins school for “ chemists,” is important. It throws into the ground the prevalent dissatisfaction with ardized education, which tends to raise the a of ability but possibly also to drag down many of the ablest. Our free universal education said, is one of the greatest social experim history. It is still an experiment. —Reactionaries grumble about the cost and more or less openly com- plain that we educate too many people. demands, however, that we do not relax our effort to give everybody the best schooling we can devise. Only so shall we discover those who give promise of hecoming — scientific, intellectual and leaders. Then to these selected few let means extend the most intensive training, facilities and the stoutest encouragement. not make tionist orgy of the risk of spoiling a genius to ma * . * A 1AN was arrested in Massachusetts recently for working on the Sabbath. He had been putting in his Sunday going from house to house selling Bibles. The judge let him off. Yet the law against Sunday work is perfectly clear. What we want to know, along with Mr. Hoover and Mr. Wickersham, is when our courts are going to begin to enforce all the laws? ar scholarship. . is to get lot of publicity that pur‘tlian good. under super- fore stand- as has been industrial us by all the finest But let's Let's not run prig. an exhil RJILW.