or water transport. Another drawback of air transport is that whereas a
ship, truck or train whose engines break down can stop until they are
mended, an aircraft with the same trouble must land. This means that an
aircraft must have several engines and this increases its cost. Safety
precautions for air transport also tend to make it expensive. It cannot be
relied upon for regular services in places or seasons with low clouds and
mist. The great advantages of air
transport being its high speed, all
civilized countries try to develop it. If you want to save time, you will
naturally fly by air.
2. Balloons. The earliest form of air transport was balloons, which
are sometimes called "free balloons" because having no engines they are
forced to drift by the wind flow. This fact alone makes balloons no!
reliable enough for carrying people. If they were safer, they would be used
more for transportation, but at .present the scientists use balloons mostly
for obtaining information about the upper atmosphere, its density, and
other scientific subjects. Weather balloons are particularly used by
meteorologists. They carry instruments whose readings are automatically
sent back
to the ground by the radio, the position of the balloon being
obtained by radar. Small balloons released from air-fields are
observed
to
obtain the direction and strength of the wind.
3. Aeroplanes. The heavier-than-air machines called aeroplanes were
rather slow in being adopted for transport. The
first aeroplane flight was
made in 1884.
World War 1 quickened the development of aerqplanes
enormously. By 1918 they were no longer unreliablelfthings
capable of only short1 flights, but powerful machines able to
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