mean while repairs were rushed and adjustments made, and
she was ready to start the next afternoon, when all three planes
started a little after six o'clock.

From the beginning of the flight from Trepassey the NC-4, thought to
be the "lame duck" of the squadron, ran away from the other two
machines. She lost contact with them very quickly and plowed through
the night alone, laying her course by the line of destroyers lying
beneath her. She was about half an hour ahead of the NC-1 at daybreak
the next day and within an easy run of Horta, Fayal.

The half-hour lead gave the NC-4 a chance to get through a fog which
was coming up over the Azores ahead of the other machines. She held a
little above it until she thought she was in the right position. Then
she came down through the mist. As it happened, she landed in the
wrong harbor, but picked herself up and found Horta a few minutes
later. She landed in Horta after fifteen hours and eighteen minutes of
flying, in which she averaged 78.4 nautical miles an hour for the
flight.

The machine was nearly five hours ahead of the schedule laid down by
the Navy Department.

Both the other planes were forced to land at sea, the NC-3 after 1,250
miles of flight--the longest ever made over water up to that time--and
the NC-1 after more than 1,100 miles in the air.

The NC-1 with Bellinger and his crew was picked up on the morning of
Saturday, May 17th, by a Greek steamer, the _Ionia_, and brought into
Horta. Towers with the NC-3 tossed about for nearly sixty hours at sea
and was not picked up until the following Monday, when the public had
begun to fear for his safety.

On Tuesday, May 20th, the NC-4 hopped off for the shortest leg of the
flight, 150 miles from Horta to Ponta Delgada, where the fuel and
supplies for the machines were. With favoring winds at her back, and
with the lightest load she had carried, she covered the distance in
one hour and forty-four minutes, an average speed of 86.7 nautical
miles an hour, or more than 99 land miles. This was a new record for
the seaplanes on the ocean flight.

Meanwhile Harry G. Hawker and Lieut.-Commander Mackenzie Grieve, the
Sopwith team waiting so long at St. John's for a chance to fly,
stimulated in their daring attempt by reports of American successes at
the Azores, took-off on their flight straight across on the afternoon
of Sunday, May 18th. All through that night he flew, when his engine
began to give signs of overheati