The Fledgling

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... in FULL-FLEDGED Soon after my stay at Nice I went for a month to the Combat and Acrobatic School of Pau, which completes the most dangerous of all the flying training. A wonderful experience--somersaults, barrel-turns, corkscrew dives, every conceivable aerial caper, and long flights daily: skimming the highest peaks of the Pyrenees at three hundred feet above the snow--trips to Biarritz and along the coast, flying ten feet above the waves, etc. It is hard to say enough in praise of the school at Pau--the hundreds of splendid machines, the perfect discipline and efficiency, the food, the barracks, the courteous treatment of pilots by officers and instructors. We were twenty Americans, in a clean airy barrack, with an Annamite to make the beds and sweep up. The school covers an enormous area in the valley of the Gave, just under the Pyrenees, and is ideal for an aviation center so far as weather conditions go, its one drawback being that motortrouble, out of range of the aerodromes, means almost inevitably a smash. All along the Gave they have the smallest fields and the highest hedges I ever saw. The climate is superb--like the foothill climate of California: cool nights, delicious days, wonderful dawns and sunsets. They started us on the eighteen-metre machine, doing vertical spirals, which are quite a thrill at first. You go to a height of about three thousand feet, shut off the motor, tilt the machine till the wings are absolutely vertical, and pull the stick all the way back. When an aeroplane inclines laterally to over forty-five degrees, the controls become reversed--the rudder is then the elevator, and the elevator the rudder, so that, in a vertical spiral, the farther back you pull the stick, the tighter the spiral becomes. You...