Send this article to a friend. Flying the Furrow. The crew was growing puzzled. Their kilometer mi flight across the Mediterranean, expected to take two hours, had now lasted three, and there was still no sign of the North African coastline. Two mechanics and McLaren's dog Tiny made up the rest of the crew. He asked to be assigned to prove it.
With the war nearing an end, Salmond was beginning to imagine peacetime air routes stretching from England to India, Australia and Africa, all via the Middle East. He saw Borton's proposal as a step toward the realization of such empire-girdling long-distance routes. It was a spartan trip: At Lyon, Borton considered himself fortunate to find an aircraft packing-case, complete with wood shavings for dunnage, in which he made "a very comfortable bed. Now, three hours out from Crete, Africa was proving elusive.
Borton and McLaren guessed that the wind had shifted, slowing them and causing them to drift. And indeed, the coast appeared soon afterward, and the map showed they were some 50 kilometers 30 mi east of their intended landfall near Sollum.
No harm done: They continued east along the coast, and after being airborne nearly five and a half hours, they set down at Marsa Matruh for refueling. In the afternoon they flew on to Alexandria, and continued to Cairo the next day. Their actual flying time to Cairo was 37 hours. The challenge of long-distance flight in the Middle East was formidable. In any direction, there were deserts to cross, and deserts, to an aviator, were little different from oceans: vast, almost featureless, expanses.
Radio directional beacons still lay a decade in the future, en-route weather stations did not yet exist, and aircraft engines were not entirely reliable. Navigation was strictly visual, aided by sun and compass and confirmedβnot always reliablyβby comparing visible ground features, such as rivers and railway tracks, to maps. Although aircraft were equipped with radios for two-way Morse-code communication, radio range was limited to to kilometers mi , and the letter-by-letter transmissions were painfully slow.
