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Show ENGINE BUILT LH(E A WATCH Fast, Modern Airplane May Readily Cost From $10,000 to $20,000 and Wears Out Quickly. The engine of your motor enr ' weighs from 500 to 1,200 pounds, or more. It will average from 20 to 30 horsepower ' r' the lowest, says a writer In Collier's. The new airplane engines run less than three pounds per horsepower and the finest of them two pounds or less. Airplanes have been built with air-cooled engines for short-distance, short-distance, fast scouting whose engines en-gines weigh less than a pound and three-quarters per horsepower. They must be quite literally, as an old advertisement ad-vertisement used to say, "built like a watch." At present a high-powered airplane engine of the best type say 120 to 150 horsepower cannot be purchased for much less than ifd.OOU. Ana the whole airplane, a big one, may readily cost $10,000 to $20,000. Tou can readily read-ily see why the construction of only 15,000 airplanes, as in England's program, pro-gram, would easily equal, for a total expenditure for men and camps and hangars and repairs and wastage, more than half a billion dollars. A fast modern airplane has an aver-1 age life of only about two or three hundred hours of active service say two months at the outside. Thi3 means that to keep 10,000 airplanes on a battle line you have to be able to build 5,000 per month or more. The cost would be almost unthinkable. That is why warfare in the air for any length of time would bankrupt the world. And that, in turn, is why warfare war-fare in the air means the end of all warfare. |