Although I had "been up" many times, back to nearly sixteen years ago, in ordinary two-seater open planes, including some "joy rides" during the War, this was my first experience of riding in a powerful closed-in type of plane. Needless to say, that at speeds of 100 to 125 miles an hour, the passenger finds a lot of difference between riding in a "sedan" plane and in an open tourer type.

On this trip we lifted up from Mascot as usual at 8 a.m. In a few minutes we were looking- down on Manly. At 8.20 we were directly over the entrance to Broken Bay, with the Hawkesbury Bridge, Go-ford and the Woy Woy district in clear view. I remembered my first trip outside the Heads over forty years ago. It was an eagerly looked forward to "joy ride" with a boy friend whose uncle owned a steamer which plied between Sydney and Gosford. It was a fast little boat of its day. but the outside run from Sydney Heads to Broken Bay to a very sick boy on a very choppy sea seemed to last, an eternity. Slightly less than filly minutes after enplaning we passed over Newcastle and a memory came to me of my second trip to sea. Another joy ride, in 1889—this time with an old-time skipper of an old-time collier, on which occasion we chugged our asthmatic way from Sydney to Newcastle in exactly one full day and one lull night. But to return to this night. Leaving Newcastle behind it was not long before Port Stephens commenced to drift by beneath us.

At 9.30 we were directly over Forster and Tuncurry at the entrance to Wallis Lakes (Cape Hawke). It happens that I know the North Coast very well and have fished most of its estuaries on" and on these thirty years past. It was an entertaining experience to look down on Forster and Tuncurry from the air, to see every channel and sandbank clearly denned and to think how many groundings and dead ends might have been avoided in the past if one had possessed the same knowledge of all the deeps and shoals that the air passenger gets skimming over them through the air. Certainly the pilot station and the hill at the entrance on which it stands looked somewhat squat from over 2,000 feet altitude, similarly an undulating golf course from the air looks much the same as a flat links. No doubt if man in his evolutionary stages had left the trees for the air instead of returning to the ground lie would nave developed a vision that gave objects on the ground a different perspective to what he now receives. It remains for some scientific optician to produce a lens that will present the landscape to the eye of the aviator exactly as it appears to the man on the ground.

Travelling over familiar country in a fast plane makes the "recollecting" cells of one's brain work overtime. You sight a familiar spot and immediately you arc engrossed in mental reminiscences that you feel urged to retail to your neighbour in the next seat (fortunately for him the dull roar of the propellers saves the infliction), but just as you are pleasantly recalling and piecing together various incidents connected with the place you were looking down on a few minutes earlier, you find yourself looking at another well remembered spot twenty miles farther along your journey and you have perforce to drop a resurrected memory in the middle of its sequence to start oft' on another train of recollection--destined to the same end. or, I should say, want of an end. Reminiscing on a fast plane trip is something like providing oneself with a magazine for a long railway journey and then finding all the stories are continued in the next issue.

When I looked down on Tuncurry it brought back a wealth of memories. There was the pilot of other days, an old sea dog with a fund of humorous stories that lie told with-out a vestige of a smile: instead lie affected a mild, almost .startled look of surprise that anyone could find amusement in them. 1 wish I had time to repeat some of his most original W. W. Jacobs-like yarns. When I looked down on the bar at the entrance ] thought of a day out over that bar with the pilot in Ills diminutive oil launch. I was in the nose of the boat baling. I had thrown several tins of water overboard before I noticed the wind was carrying a goodly proportion of each tinful back over my skipper. "Ah!" he said mildly when he saw I realised what I had been doing, "No one should throw water in the face of the wind at sea un1il he has been round the Horn seven times.''

I was just getting some of my almost forgot ten friend's stories back to mind when I found we had flown miles past his one-time station and I was over another familiar spot that jerked my mind away to a quite different incident. This time it was a place that twenty-five years ago was a busy .saw-milling centre. Alongside the home of the friend I stayed with stood a tallow-wood tree about four feet in diameter. Feeling very energetic one morning 1 started to fell that tree. I got very sick of the job at the end of an hour, but pride and the curious looks of passers-by made me stick to the task. I was rather proud of my feat and, after estimating the super feet the twenty feet of straight log would cut and costing the freight, etc., I decided to have the log sawn off; then I had it dragged down to the near-by wharf with a team of bullocks, shipped it to Sydney, and had it milled into suitable sizes for use on a stable I was building. Alas! it proved the most brittle sample of timber that ever went into any structure. A horse had only to snort at a stall rail made of it and the rail snapped like a carrot. I might have known that a tallow-wood tree of twelve feet girth would not have been left nourishing where it .stood if it had any marketable value. My local friend, who was very enthusiastic and helpful in shipping the log, knew even less, I might add, than I did about the qualities of standing timber.

Now these digressions have very little to do with the air voyage I set out to describe, but I have noticed that even the best written trip concerning any kind of tour makes very dull reading. At least I know I shy off them myself unless there is some kind of a story dragged in somewhere, so let that be my excuse for lagging behind the cart, I mean the Brisbane Air Liner.

The main and ever-present thought all through the journey was the comparison in the time occupied by a plane travelling from point to point as against any other mode of transit. Not many years ago the Cape Hawke district was a favorite Government Tourist Bureau Tour. One took train to Newcastle in the morning, proceeded after lunch by coach to Salt Ash, thence by steamer to The Tea Gardens on Port Stephens, where the night was spent. Early next morning a launch conveyed passengers up the Myall River (really a natural canal) through the Broadwater and Myall Lakes to Bungwahl from whence another coach deposited one at the southern extremity of the Wallis Lakes, where another launch was in waiting to deliver its passengers to Forster in the late afternoon.

The substitution of motor transport for horse coaches did not make a very appreciable reduction in the time occupied on the through journey. It was still well on into the second day before one arrived at Cape Hawke. Soon after the North Coast railway line reached Taree the inland water trip lost favour and trippers and others bound for Forster and Tuncurry discarded the beautiful inland water trip for the speedier journey by, train via Taree, but even by this route the journey occupies a full day, including over nine hours spent in the train. In the plane we had done the journey in ninety minutes. Returning from Brisbane with a following wind our pilot cut almost .twenty minutes off that record; to be exact, the journeying time was seventy-two minutes from Tuncurry till we touched ground at Mascot, I would like to go on and set down on the one hand the times at which we passed over the various big and little rivers and fishing spots en route and on the other side set down the time 1 have occupied travelling to those places in the coastal boat days. Three days on one occasion from the Richmond to Sydney after being bar bound at Ballina for five days! But I think 1 have said enough on the speed aspect of air travel.

ABOVE THE CLOUDS

Before the advent of the aeroplane, those clouds seemed far beyond the reach of man. They seemed as near to the moon as to the earth. Today we are becoming used to seeing occasional planes drop out of them into the lower .air or disappear behind them. On the particular trip I am describing, about one hundred miles south of the Clarence we ran into banking clouds and a spit of rain. Our pilot decided to climb, and we saw the cabin altimeter moving clockwise fashion. After flying round about 2000 feet for three hours or more we got interested when the meter showed 3000 feet. Gradually it went up to 4.500 feet and hung there for some time. I have no doubt the other passengers, like myself, were making mental calculations as to how many feet constitute a mile, because when finally the meter hand moved quickly up another 1000 feet each passenger looked at another and pointed to the instrument with a smile of triumph, much as if he were in some part personally responsible for the uplift, but the hand kept on moving steadily till it registered a full 8000 feet of height—over one and a half miles above the ground and its earth-bound traffic.

From this height we looked down on the clouds. To the eye they looked .exactly like range upon range of snow-clad mountains with exactly the same peak and gully formations. Occasionally we rode through a detached" mass and the mist blocked our view for a second, much as a drifting fog will interrupt the view of actual mountains. More often we rode over clear patches and got wide glimpses of the earth and ocean, standing out, in a shaded and sunlit pattern. The travelling sensation in a big closed in plane, especially above the clouds, is that the plane is merely drifting and that the clouds are rushing by. Of course, if one puts one's head or hand out through a "port hole" the drifting sensation suddenly vanishes.

The Sydney-Brisbane trip is particularly interesting from a scenic point of view, as the ocean front is in view all the way. On a night such as this one cannot help thinking of the years that were spent in laboriously exploring, charting and pioneering-'that 500 miles of coastline between Sydney and Brisbane. Now in the modern aeroplane a few men in the one day could, with the aid of the camera, map the whole area and locate the fertile and infertile lands. But I fear I have written over much of a trip that already is becoming a commonplace to to many. I cannot, however, close without drawing another speed comparison.

On the journey from Brisbane to Sydney we enplaned at 8 a.m. and landed at Mascot at 12.14 - four and a quarter hours' travel. The Brisbane-Sydney express left Brisbane five minutes after us (8.5 a.m.) and arrived, or was timed to arrive at 11.25 a.m. the next day.

We are moving in an age of fast and ever faster transport, and even if we have the shorter span on that account, which dictum this writer begs to doubt, we can certainly really "live" more in a given period that our fathers could in twice file time.