LIVERPOOL-BELFAST.

NEW AIR SERVICE.

Things looked black this morning for the formal inauguration of the Belfast-liverpool air service, which is not only to effect such a revolution in postal services between England and Northern Ireland, but will enable passengers to do in a couple of hours a journey which now occupies nine or ten hours. It will, incidentally, also enable Ulster readers of The Daily Telegraph to obtain their journal at a very much earlier hour than they have been able to do up to the present, for part of the scheme of the Northern Air Lines, the company controlling the enterprise, is to convey English newspapers, among other parcels.

Rain fell torrentially last night and has continued throughout to-day. There was a mist, too, and a dull, leaden pall lingered over the vast estuary of the Mersey. Nevertheless, one of the two De Haviland aeroplanes which are to be used on the regular daily service left here at 5.30 a.m., piloted by V. N. Dickinson. It landed on the Southport sands and up to this afternoon it had not, owing to the thickened haze on the sea, been able to resume its journey. So far as the formal inauguration of the service was converned, it was on the sister D.H. 50 machine, in charge of that intrepid pilot Alan Cobham, that chief interest centred. This plane left here yesterday at 7.35 a.m., with only one passenger, Major-general Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation, and landed at 9.45 a.m. at the Malone aerodrome, Belfast, having thus done the journey in two hours and ten minutes.