ng, due to a clogged water-filter.
Early the next morning, about half-way across, Hawker decided that
there was no chance to make the land, and began looking through the
fog for a chance for a safe landing.

By zigzagging on the steamship courses for about two hours, with his
engine hot but running well, he picked up the Danish steamer _Mary_,
and pancaked on the water about two miles ahead of her. Because the
little tramp steamer had no wireless, the world was kept waiting a
week, before word was signaled to land that Hawker and Grieve were
safe.

With the Sopwith team out of the race, it became evident that
Commander Read and the NC-4 would actually win the honors for the
first flight. On the morning of May 27th he started over his
well-patrolled course of eight hundred miles, and, after a little less
than ten hours of flight, brought his machine into the harbor before
Lisbon, Portugal. Americans had crossed the ocean in the air, and the
enthusiastic Portuguese capital turned out to do them every honor.

Read, however, rather than linger, pushed on again May 30th, in the
midst of the celebration for his triumph on the last leg of his course
to Plymouth, seven hundred and seventy-five nautical miles. Engine
trouble, the first since the machine had left Chatham, developed, and
at the end of two hours he was forced to land at the mouth of the
Mondego River, about a hundred miles on his way. The trouble was a
water leak. It was quickly repaired, and he started again, but
decided to put up at Ferrol, Spain, two hundred miles farther on the
course, for the night.

Early in the morning of May 31st Commander Read started from Ferrol
for Plymouth, and at the end of seven hours and six minutes of flight
came down in the harbor, where a warm reception was waiting for him.
The actual flying time since leaving the Rockaway Naval Air Station
was fifty-seven hours and sixteen minutes, and the average rate of
flight was at a speed of sixty-eight nautical miles an hour.

VII

LANDING-FIELDS--THE IMMEDIATE NEED

The immediate need, to establish aviation throughout the entire
country, is a series of landing-fields from the Atlantic to the
Pacific coast. These landing-fields should not be designed primarily
for transcontinental flying-stations, but for city-to-city flying.
There is going to be a great amount of aerial traffic from New York to
San Francisco, to be sure, but the future of flying is in the linking
up of ci