air, but
it is not easy to manoeuvre in face of the enemy. The Dunne machine
adjusted itself more readily to the gusts and currents of the air than
to the demands of the pilot. Skilled war-pilots prefer to handle a
machine which is as quick as a squirrel and responds at once to the
pressure of a finger on the control. If the aeroplane had been developed
wholly in peace, some of the stable machines of the early inventors
would have come into their own, and would have had a numerous following.

The first flight ever made over English soil was made by Mr. A. V. Roe,
in a machine of his own construction. Mr. Roe began life as an
apprentice at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Locomotive Works,
and very early distinguished himself in cycle racing. He then qualified
as a fitter at Portsmouth Dockyard, studied naval engineering at King's
College, London, and spent three years, from 1899 to 1902, in the
merchant service as a marine engineer. The seagulls and the albatross of
the southern seas set him thinking, and he began to make model gliders.
Returned home again, he spent some time as a draughtsman in the motor
industry. The news of the Wrights' achievements found in him a ready
believer, and he wrote to _The Times_ to combat the prevailing
scepticism. His letter was printed, with a foot-note by the engineering
editor to the effect that all attempts at artificial flight on such a
basis as Mr. Roe described were not only dangerous to human life, but
were foredoomed to failure from the engineering standpoint. From 1906
onwards Mr. Roe devoted all his time and all his savings to aviation. In
1907 he made a full-size flying machine and took it to the Brooklands
motor track. He had no sufficient engine power, and while he was waiting
many months for the arrival of a twenty-four horse-power Antoinette
engine from France he induced sympathetic motorists to give him
experimental towing flights. It was difficult, he says, to induce the
motorists to let go at once when the machine began to swerve in the air;
they often held on with inconvenient fidelity, and many of the
experiments ended in a dive and a crash. In the spring of 1908 his
Antoinette engine arrived, and on the 8th of June he made the first
flight ever made in England, covering some sixty yards at a height of
two feet from the ground. Then he received notice to quit Brooklands. He
had never been much favoured by the management, who perhaps thought that
the wreckage of