[Illustration: Erecting the 15-ton Felixstowe Fury.]
"We had to have our aerodromes well out from the centre of the cities--land too hard to get inside. Had to whiz the mail out from the post office to the bus, and tranship again at the other end. Took a lot of time. But the jolly old mail-trains started from a point near the post office, and the letters were sorted while the train was travelling. Mist or fog, gales and snow, blew our time-tables sky-high. You should have seen us tearing our hair in bad weather. Of course bad weather sometimes interfered with the train service a bit, but not to the same extent. There was nothing in it so far as time was concerned, and they had us beaten four ways on reliability.
"We speeded up the faithful old sky-waggons. But that meant bigger grounds to flop down into, so we had to go farther out from the cities. That made the time taken to get mails out to us a bit longer. We saved something at the receiving end by dropping the mails bang on top of the post office building. But the trains were speeded up too; they delivered special mails by motor-cycle straight from the railway station. We had nothing on them.
"But with the increase of speed we had more crashes in fog and mist. Rain was troublesome too. Summer wasn't so bad, but winter put us down and out. Mails have got to be carried every day in the year. Important mails were delayed and sometimes destroyed. That fed up the men who wrote 'em. We tried putting up a kite-balloon above the mist, and gliding down from that. Not good enough. The aerodromes were too small, and the dashing aviators fetched up into houses, ditches, and trees. And, of course, a forced landing on the way under bad weather conditions was nearly always fatal. Insurance went higher than the machines.
"We weren't reliable enough. No commercial firm could stand the expense. The Government gave no assistance. The Treasury was squeezing every penny until Britannia squealed. We tried for two years, and then my little lot went phut.
"Yes, the mail-carriers had more success in less well-developed countries. Better weather conditions, longer runs, slower trains. But the money in it was nothing to write home about.
"You remember the rather slow and clumsy four-engine aeroplanes they made such a fuss about? Well, they proved to be about the limit in size for a land-machine. Bigger ones were tried, but they were no go. Landing wheel loads, landing speeds, surfaces of aerodromes, big sheds, cost of crashes. The big slow aeroplanes could get into an aerodrome that the ordinary fast scout merchant could get down into, but when they speeded them up, so that they could get from one place to another in a thirty-knot wind in a reasonable time, they took the most of a county to land in.