"BRAVE YOUNG MEN."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 304, 16 May 1913, Page 2

"BRAVE YOUNG MEN."

NAVAL AIRMAN AT SEA IN A GALE. LEAP FROM A WAVE. The "brave young man" of the Flying ' Corns who, as Colonel Scely said in his speech on the Army Estimates, Hew in a wind of fifty-seven miles per hour, has some great rivals in both the naval and military wings of the corps. Perhaps the finest feat of the naval wing was a water-plane flight off the east coast recently, when an officer deliberately went out to sea in a 35-mile an hour wind to see what his machine could do in heavy waves. A destroyer put out after him as he started, but after a quarter of an hour found the wind rising 1 and the sea so high that the commander ] considered the flying officer would never attempt a descent and returned to harI bor. 1 The destroyer had just turned back 1-when the airman began to come down in wide circles. The machine, stoutly built and British made, alighted on the crest

of a foaming wave and almost disappeared from view in the trough of the sea. The spray .broke over the top plane, and the airman was drenched. Running before, the wind with his engine throttled down, the airman satisfied himself of his machine's seaworthiness. "' LEAPING INTO THE AIR."

Swinging round —a moment of great peril occurred as lie was beam-on to the wind—the airman opened his throttle, and, as it was described afterwards, "fairly leapt into the air off the top of a big wave?' This flight and those of the four officers at Weymouth, who during the King's review (lew out to sea :uhl hack again in a driving wet mist that gave a view of fifty yards at most, are the best achievements of the naval flyers up to date. The gallantry of the Flying Corps is only excelled by its modesty, which resents any mention of names in accounts of its exploits. An excellent feature of the corps is the cordial co-opeVation and good-fellowship not only between Navy and Army officers, but only between officers and men, due to the equal sharing of the perils of the calling.