Volume 16 No 1 Feb 1965.pdf - Lakes Gliding Club

iBOOK REVIEW•Great Flights and Air Adventures, by NORMAN MACMILLAN. Published1964 by G. Bell and Sons Ltd., London. Price 21s.HIS book is subtitled "From Balloons to Spacecraft", and the 22 chapters cer·T tainly show variety. The first is an account of Gerden Cooper's orbital flight in1963, the next of a distance record by balloon from England to Russia in 1907. thethird of the earliest cross-Channel flights, the fourth of the first crossing of theAlps by aeroplane, and so on.Captain Macmillan uses published material almost entirely and rewrites it injournalistic style. Yet my favourite Macmillan book remains his first, "The Art ofF ying", pUblished in 1928, in which he wrote about the ways of the air like asailplane pilot. But he seems to have "written himself out" on the subject in thatonc book, for he never took up gliding, and his 19 subsequent books have beenalmost entirely about other people's flights, though this one includes a flight ofhis over the Andes.In the present b00k, gliding gets only two chapters, both devoted to the flyingcareer of Hanna Reitsch and evidently based on her autobiography (except that heplaces the Rossitten gliding centre in Pomerania instead of East Prus.~ia). The firstof the two starts with her first cloud flight, in which she lost control in a cu·nim,and the second ends with her imprisonment for 15 months by the Americanauthorities because they thought she had been Hitler's pilot. (The identity of Hitler'sprivate pilot has since been disc.losed in a book, ~Hit1er's Pilot", by Hans Baur,published in English translation in 1958; he held down the job from 1932 till thelast days in the Berlin bunker.) In between, much flying in various aircraft isdescribed, including a detailed account of her crossing of the Alps in a SperberJunior from Salzburg to the Piave valley in 1937.The last five chapters are devoted to space travel and include most of themanned flights. The book would make interesting reading for any young aviation"fan",Some Further Observations from Aircraft of Temperatures andHumidities near Stratocumulus Cloud, by J. G. MooRE, B.SC. MeteorologicalOffice Scienti.fic Paper No.. 19. Published 1964 by H.M. StationeryOffice, 'London. Price 3s.TRATOCUMULUS cloud sheets are known to be formed from water vapourSlifted by convection and turbulence from the moist layer of air just above theearth's surface. Yet, although sailplane pilots have often found thermals belowstratocumulus, they never seem to have been lifted by these thermals right intothe cloud.This paper gives observations from 11 meterological flights below, throughand above stratocumulus - eight in the daytime, two at night and one at sunset,at! in the Farnborough area. In each flight, runs were made at every 250 ft. levelexcept for the first 500 ft. above the cloud top, where they were made at every 100 ft.This paper is l'Iot interested in thermals as such, but it gives temperaturereadings at the various heights, plotted on a tephigram, and from these One canaSSume that the air has been stirred by thermals at any level where there is anadiabatic lapse rate. So here is a summary (by the reviewer) of the findings, givingthe time and date of each flight:-(1) Dry adiabatic lapse rate up to and through the cloud layer to its top:10.00-13.00 G.M.T., 24th October; 10.10-12.50, 19th March.. (2) Dry adiabatic rate up to and part of the way throug'h the cloud layer:1~.20-17.30, 18th March; 18.00-20.30, 23rd Oct.; 18.00-20.30, 3rd Nov.; 10.30-12.30,,bth March (most of the way through a layer 1,500 ft. thick).57