is credited with 3,000
aeroplanes, Russia with about 1,000, Austria with 1,500, and Bulgaria
and Turkey with 500. In a statement made in the British House of
Commons, Mr. Tennant, speaking of the Royal British Flying Corps,
declared that 835 officers and 521 civilians were on the waiting list
of the Flying Corps in the last week of February, 1916.

France has definitely discontinued the use of monoplanes and is
manufacturing them solely for the British forces, as some of the
British aviators greatly prefer the monoplane. One of the reasons
given by the French for their action is the construction of Fokker
monoplanes by the Germans, which are so accurate a copy of the earlier
Morane monoplanes of the French that they could not be distinguished
from them in the air. Furthermore, the German copy of the Morane was
far speedier and could easily outdistance or overtake the French
machines of the same type. In place of the original Morane France now
has three types of speed planes, the Maurice Farman, a 110 mph.
biplane, the Morane-Saulnier, 111 mph., and Spad, 107 mph. The older
Nieuports, too, are fast machines, being capable of more than 100
miles per hour.

The new Maurice Farman speed plane is a biplane of small wing area,
the upper plane overhanging the lower. It is equipped with a new type
of Renault-Mercedes eight-cylinder motor, giving 240 horsepower at the
highest crank shaft speed. The Morane-Saulnier and the Spad are both
monoplanes, but of different shape and construction from the original
Morane; it is of the so-called monocoque type, made familiar to
Americans by the Duperdessin monocoques which took part in the Gordon
Bennett Cup race in Chicago in 1912. It is equipped with a device
which was first used in Germany and which permits the firing of the
gun through the propeller. It is an electric synchronizing device
which fires the gun at the exact moment when the bullet will pass
between the propeller blades.

Following the destructive raids of the German naval Zeppelins over the
eastern counties of England during the last days of January, 1916,
there came a period of retaliation flights by Allied aviators over
German cities, attacks on railway stations and munition depots,
culminating in the great attack of the coast of Schleswig-Holstein by
a fleet of British aeroplanes. On a certain section of this coast the
Germans have erected a series of Zeppelin hangars behind one of the
most elaborate systems of defe