The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1912. THE ART OF FLYING.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 19, 14 September 1912, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1912. THE ART OF FLYING.

Ifc is thirteen years since Mr H. G. Wells, the novelist, predicted that in his lifetime the world would see men flying, and quite recently he gave the "Daily Mail" a graphic account of his own first flight in a water-plane with Mr Graham White. It was, he said, as steady as a motor-car running on asphalt. Mr Wells goes on to point out that the development of these waterplanes is an important step towards the huge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainly imminent, and says that the survivors of those who believed in and wrote about flying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss about the dangers and difficulties of landing and getting up. Though it is still true that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite level expanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business, getting up and landing upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed. This ialone, Mr Wells thinks, is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of the world's coast-lines and lake groups and water-ways. The airmen will go to and fro over water as the midges do. Wherever there is a square mile of water the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the mouth of their nest. Over water the air, it seems, lies in great level expanses; even when there are gales it moves in great uniform masses, like the swift, still rush of a deep river. The airman, in Mr Grahame White's phrase, can go to sleep on it. Hut over the land, and for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than a torrent among rocks; "it is a waving, whirling, eddying, flamboyant confusion. A slight hill, a ploughed held, the streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams and cataracts, of air, that catch the airman unawares, make him drop disconcertingly, try his nerves."