MY FIRST FLYING LESSON.

Otago Witness, Issue 3415, 29 August 1919, Page 59

MY FIRST FLYING LESSON.

STUNTS FOR A BEGINNER. It was one of those mornings of pilots. There was an exhilarating freshness in the air, so that one felt it -was good to be alive. A splendid touch of colour was added to the aerodrome'by the sun just rising over the hills. The aeroplane was wheeled from its hangar out on to the greensward. It almost seemed to be yearning to be up and away. I had never been up before, so I was anxious to get some idea before the trip started of how aeroplanes are controlled. I asked my pilot if he could give me that glimmering. His reply was crisp. " You will learn more in five minutes of trying to. fly than I could teach you in hours ""of talk." " Fetch a telephone," he ordered. While a mechanic ran for. the telephone, the pilot briefly explained the mechanism to me. I climbed up into the front seat, and already felt-rather lonely. ' " This," said my instructor, wobbling what appeared to me to be a whangee cane, is the "stick." The machine responds to eyery movement of the "stick." I? her nose is too high you pull the "stick" this way; if her tail is too high you pull it this way; if her wings are too high or too low on either side you pull it* this way or that way. "And what are these?" I asked, indicating -pedals in the well of my seat. " Oh, that's the rudder," was the answer. "If you want to turn to the left, then press your foot so; if you want to turn to the right, then so. Now I'll take you up, and I'll telephone when I have released control." The instructor then climbed into the "passenger" seat. Mechanics brought a telephone arrangement and fastened it to my ears; but there was no mouthpiece for me to talk to the instructor, and I felt that I would very soon want to talk to him. " I might—er—let you down,' I told him. •■ Oh, no fear of that," he answered. "I'm going to take vou up so high that it won't matter if you do. I can pull her up again." p There parley ended. The engine broke into its guttural roar. The signal was given for the blocks under the undercarriage to be removed. I tried to perceive when we left the turf, but only realised it when the aerodrome and its surroundings diminished and a wondrous panorama of sea and land began to unscroll itself. I was so fascinated by the sight of a huge strip of the South of Scotland and the Forth that I forgot all about my flying lesson. Suddenlv the landscape began to slide about. The quilt-work brown world below began to undulate, and the diminutive hamlets and tree-clad hills underneath me grew larger and larger, as though seen through a magnifying -glass of automatic increasing lens. It was my instructor landing in soma-

body's field. "Thank goodness!" I thought. " He's coming down to tell ma that he has thought better of my lesson." But I was wrong. Casually as a friend would stop his car and say ", "Would you like the hood up?" the instructor said, " You are in a draught. Your windscreen has a loose screw. Tighten it up." He was off again. When we had once more left the earth some 6000 ft below and I was feeling that "ever-so-happy" sensation of an .aeroplane passenger, I heard the instructor shouting something througH the telephone. But I could hear nothing after the word "Now." However, I gripped the "stick"—-all the time the instructor had been working his end of the dual control the "stick" had been mockingly whacking my legs—and watched the nose, the nort, and the stair board of the strange craft of which. I was temporary captain. For a minute or so everything went so well that I had nothing to do. I moved the "stick," which was resting now in a, meditative sort of way, to see what would happen. Nothing -I pulled the "stick" hard. The aeroplane ceased to be an aero* plane; it became a mad mustang. The' world below no longer nndulated ; it rose' and fell in cosmic tiltings. I pulled the "stick",towards me, and I saw the nosd of the aeroplane rampant. Then the nose fell down—and the aeroplane fell with.it. When it had fallen as far as he deemed convenient, the instructor resumed control. And then a strange thing happened. The earth rose; it stood like the wall of the world before me—it still rose, and, as my head swam, I stared at the nomenon of the earth above me where, the sky had been a moment before. The earth had gone " doighted," and, like ft bowl, rolled overhead and roofed vs. It was only my instructor, one of the finest fliers in Britain, doing a "stunt," I was told afterwards. We had other "stunts" before the flight was over. The last almost cancels the mempry of the others. We were going home sedately; I could see our lilliputiaa landing-place thousands of feet below, and then we sideslipped and fell! We fell, and fell, and fell. There is something, I suppose, in centripetal force which keeps" aeroplane passengers in their sets as they fall, with nothing between their* gaze and the world rushing up frora below. We. fell, and fell. Was it a "stunt"? Was all well with my oilot? Had he stunted too far? Should the passenger da anything? What about that "stick"? And then, when the aerodrome was large beneath lis, the instructor pulled her up, and we .glided gently to earth. " I let her fall on* purpose," said the instructor laconically. "A few years ago that would have meant certain death." \A headache, an uncertainty of step, a' feeling of incarnate youth and joy, dashed only by the hunger to go up again, are one's sensations after stunt" flying.—« A. R. E. M., in the Scotsman v