His first flight the novice makes in a machine especially fitted for instruction. The levers are fitted with double handles so that both learner and tutor may hold them at once. If the greenhorn pushes when he should pull the veteran's grip is hard on the handle to correct the error before it can cost two lives--for in the air there is little time to experiment. Either set of controls will steer the machine. The pupil grasps his levers, and puts his feet on the pedals. At first the instructor will do the steering, the pupil following with hands and feet as the motions made by the instructor are communicated to him by the moving levers. For a time the two work together. Then as the instructor senses that the student himself is doing the right thing he gradually lessens his own activity, until after a few days' practice the student finds that he is flying with a passenger and directing the machine himself. In France, at any rate, they teach in brief lessons. Each flight for instruction is limited to about five minutes. At first the student operates in a "penguin"--a machine which will run swiftly along the ground but cannot rise. It is no easy trick at first, to control the "penguin" and keep its course direct. Then he will try the "jumps" in a machine that leaps into the air and descends automatically after a twenty to forty yards' flight. As Darius Green expressed it so long ago, the trouble about flying comes when you want to alight. That holds as true to-day with the most perfect airplanes, as in boyhood days when one jumped from the barn in perfect confidence that the family umbrella would serve as a parachute. To alight with an airplane the pilot--supposing his descent to be voluntary and not compelled by accident or otherwise--surveys the country about him for a level field, big and clear enough for the machine to run off its momentum in a run of perhaps two hundred yards on its wheels. Then he gets up a good rate of speed, points the nose of the 'plane down at a sharp angle to the ground, cuts off the engine, and glides. The angle of the fall must be great enough for the force of gravity to keep up the speed. There is a minimum speed at which an airplane will remain subject to control. Loss of speed--" perte de vitesse," as the French call it--is the aviator's most common peril in landing. If it occurs after his engine is cut off and he has not the time to start it again, the machine tilts and slides down sideways. If it occurs higher up a vrille is the probable result. In this the plane plunges toward the ground spinning round and round with the corner of one wing as a pivot. In either case a serious accident is almost inevitable.
In fact the land is almost as dangerous to the navigator of the air as it is to him of the sea. To make good landings is an art only perfected by constant practice. To shut off the engine at precisely the right moment, to choose an angle of descent that will secure the greatest speed and at the same moment bring you to your landing place, to change at the most favourable time from this angle to one that will bring you to the ground at the most gentle of obtuse angles, and to let your machine, weighing perhaps a ton, drop as lightly as a bird and run along the earth for several hundred feet before coming to a full stop, are all features of making a landing which the aviator has to master.
In full air there are but few perils to encounter. All airmen unite in declaring that even to the novice in an airplane there is none of that sense of dizziness or vertigo which so many people experience in looking down from high places. The flyer has no sense of motion. A speed of forty miles an hour and of one hundred miles are the same to him. As he looks down the earth seems to be slipping away from him, and moving by, tailwards, like an old-fashioned panorama being unwound.
