for the practice, a most valuable experience
which increases the confidence of the pilot. He learns to use his own
judgment and to gauge height and ground distance as it appears from
the air.

After three or four hours of solo time the pupil is scheduled for
another demonstration of higher maneuvers, spinning and the stall
turn. For the stall turn the pilot noses the machine down to get an
air speed of seventy-five miles an hour. A little bank, stick back,
she rears into the air with her nose to the sky and propeller roaring.
Full rudder and throttle off. In silence she drops over on her side
into the empty air; blue sky and green fields flash by in a whirl. She
hangs on her back while the passengers strain against the safety
belts, and then her nose plunges. The air shrieks in the wires as the
ground comes up at terrific speed.

It is time for the pupil to go up for his solo spin under the plan
adopted for army purposes. Up, up, up the pupil flies, three thousand
feet, and the ground below looks soft and green. Would it be soft to
hit in a spin from that height? It would not. Have people ever spun
that far? he wonders. They have. Have machines ever failed to come out
of a spin and killed the pilot? The answer is too obvious. With faith
in nothing in particular, and with his mind made up that one can die
but once in a spin, he stalls and spins her--and comes out. He is so
surprised and exhilarated that he tries it again before he loses his
nerve. Yet again. The pupil is a pilot, the air has no terrors, and he
has learned the oldest truth of flying, that there is nothing to a
spin unless you don't come out.

The natural result of training a pupil along those lines is that he
graduates rapidly into a good stunting pilot. He realizes that he
cannot tempt the devil at three hundred feet and hope to live, but he
takes a good altitude, throws his machine upside down, and knows that,
given enough air, he must come out. He does come out unless he loses
complete control of his mind and body. With fifteen hours of solo
flying the pupil has really become a pilot. He is beginning to show
that he can control his machine. From then on it is a question of the
polishing of the nice points, making his forced landings perfect, not
side-slipping a foot on his vertical banks, and coming out of spin so
that he always faces the airdrome--all of which distinguish the good
pilot from the poor pilot.

IV

SAFETY IN FLYING

The