Page:Aerial travel for Business or Pleasure - Thos Cook & Son - 1919.pdf/3

 to take its place as a recognized method of locomotion and transit for travellers. Although for the moment, and probably for some little time to come, civilian flying for long journeys will be more or less limited, we are issuing this preliminary brochure now to announce that we act as the official

in the same way as we act in that capacity for the chief Railway and Steamship Lines of the world.

Aerial Travel is, of course, in its infancy, but most people already recognize that for transit purposes its possibilities are boundless, address at Queen's Hall, dealt with the various fields of utility open to the aeroplane, and with reference to its possibilities for travel said, "Space will be annihilated, and the cities of the world brought within the reach of all. There will be an hourly service between London and Paris, so that it will be possible to journey there, to transact business, to lunch in comfort, and return in time to attend to the correspondence that has accumulated in the office during the day. If we feel in need of a change we shall be able to start out for Venice to feed the pigeons of St. Mark's, to fly off to Norway to witness the spectacle of the Midnight Sun, or to spend the week-end in Cairo."

This was not mere rhetoric, as the world will shortly realize. The science of aeronautics has already advanced so far that one is as safe to-day in the air as on the railway, on the sea or in a motor-car on the road. People marvel less to-day at the flight of the Atlantic than they did when Bleriot flew the Channel with his monoplane, yet to-day the Channel is a mere ditch over which the aviator flies in the ordinary course of his work. In March last, one Handley Page machine alone carried over 700 passengers between England and France.

Particulars of the Services to Continental and other cities will be given in a future edition of this brochure, also of more extended tours by aeroplane as soon as the necessary arrangements with the connecting aerial lines abroad have been completed.

A beginning in civilian flying was made, however, at Easter, when we were able to insert in the London newspapers the first advertisement in this country of tickets for public trips by aeroplane. It was a lowly enough commencement—less than half-an-hour's trip for a couple of guineas. But seeing that the future of the aeroplane seems to be as illimitable as the medium through which it