345
NOTES AND QUERIES
FROM THE BELGIAN JOURNAL AVIATION, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 14, MARCH 1946
©TRANSLATION BY PAUL BOLDING
Gliding: How Louis de San beat the Asian duration and altitude records in Chungking, China, in 1940
In 1939, Louis de San set off for China to serve as a diplomat. A keen glider pilot, he was eager to taste the eastern thermal currents. When he set off in a Chinese glider, towed by a military plane, it was to be for a flight of more than four hours and set an Asian record. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he managed to flee Hong Kong as the bombs fell, and to reach South Africa. There he joined the RAF and passed his examinations as an aeroplane pilot. Lieutenant de San then went to Congo, where he was based until the end of hostilities and undertook various missions and operations in Oxford and SV4 planes. This is his account of how he set the record in China:
It was 1940. For a year I had been in Chungking, wartime capital of the Chinese government. There was bombing day and night, crushing heat of more than 40 degrees, tension, loneliness... There were few distractions: one was being a spectator in the virtually hopeless struggle of the Chinese people, at war for two years. I travelled the country and spent hours watching the clouds, birds, weather conditions; I rapidly concluded that the good thermals had to be as numerous as fish in the Yangtse.
I knew every corner of the area around Chungking. The town was a kind of peninsula, surrounded by two mighty rivers, the Yangtse and the Kialing. Thousands of dark roofs, large areas flattened by Japanese bombing, the immediate contrast of great expanses of water, and over it all leaden skies, more oppressive than the strongest sun in Coquilhatville1 or Lake Leopold II in Congo.
Where great gliding birds untiringly traced their spirals higher, there had to be powerful thermal currents. Above the town, above the white sandbanks emerging from the river, one saw from morning to
345
NOTES AND QUERIES
FROM THE BELGIAN JOURNAL AVIATION, VOLUME 2, NUMBER 14, MARCH 1946
©TRANSLATION BY PAUL BOLDING
Gliding: How Louis de San beat the Asian duration and altitude records in Chungking, China, in 1940
In 1939, Louis de San set off for China to serve as a diplomat. A keen glider pilot, he was eager to taste the eastern thermal currents. When he set off in a Chinese glider, towed by a military plane, it was to be for a flight of more than four hours and set an Asian record. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he managed to flee Hong Kong as the bombs fell, and to reach South Africa. There he joined the RAF and passed his examinations as an aeroplane pilot. Lieutenant de San then went to Congo, where he was based until the end of hostilities and undertook various missions and operations in Oxford and SV4 planes. This is his account of how he set the record in China:
It was 1940. For a year I had been in Chungking, wartime capital of the Chinese government. There was bombing day and night, crushing heat of more than 40 degrees, tension, loneliness ... There were few distractions: one was a spectator in the virtually hopeless struggle of the Chinese people, at war for two years. I travelled the country and spent hours watching the clouds, birds, weather conditions; I rapidly concluded that the good thermals had to be as numerous as fish in the Yangtse.
I knew every corner of the area around Chungking. The town was a kind of peninsula, surrounded by two mighty rivers, the Yangtse and the Kialing. Thousands of dark roofs, large areas flattened by Japanese bombing, the immediate contrast of great expanses of water, and over it all leaden skies, more oppressive than the strongest sun in Coquilhatville1 or Lake Leopold II in Congo.
Where great gliding birds untiringly traced their spirals higher, there had to be powerful thermal currents. Above the town, above the white sandbanks emerging from the river, one saw from morning to
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