n the experience of the Royal Air Force in Canada.

There will be as much difference between the civilian pilot, the man
who owns an airplane of the future and drives it himself, and the army
flier, as there is now between the man who drives his car on Sunday
afternoons over country roads and the racing driver who is striving
for new records on specially built tracks. If aeronautics is to be
made popular, every one must be able to take part in it. It must cease
to be a highly specialized business. It must be put on a basis where
the ordinary person can snap the flying wires of a machine, listen to
their twang, and know them to be true, just as any one now thumps his
rear tire to see whether it is properly inflated.

The book, in a large sense a labor of love, is the collaboration of
an American officer of the United States Air Service and another
American, a flying-officer in the Royal Air Force. If the Royal Air
Force way of doing things seems to crowd itself to the fore in the
discussion of the training of pilots, the authors crave indulgence.

In a subject which lends itself dangerously to imagination, the
authors have endeavored to base what they have written, not on
prophecy, but on actual accomplishments to date. The latter are indeed
so solid that there is no necessity for guesswork. Aviation has proved
itself beyond peradventure to those who have followed it, but up to
the present the general public has not sufficiently analyzed its
demonstrated possibilities.

The era of the air is undoubtedly at hand; it now remains to take the
steps necessary to reap full advantages from it.

ARTHUR SWEETSER,
GORDON LAMONT.

OPPORTUNITIES IN AVIATION

I

WAR'S CONQUEST OF THE AIR

The World War opened to man the freedom of the skies. Amid all its
anguish and suffering has come forth the conquest of the air.
Scientists, manufacturers, dreamers, and the most hard-headed of men
have united under the goad of its necessity to sweep away in a series
of supreme efforts all the fears and doubts which had chained men to
earth.

True, years before, in fact, nearly a decade before, the Wright
brothers had risen from the ground and flown about through the air in
a machine which defied conventional rules and beliefs. The world had
looked on in wonder, and then dropped back into an apathetic
acceptance of the fact. Despite the act