Prize of the air

By Ben Conlon
At a height of about two thousand feet Bill Barlow completed the loop and then flew into the wind over the landing “T”.
“Great stuff!” yelled his passenger, and Bill could hear his chuckle, for he had now throttled his motor and was making a quick bank to the left.
“Thought you’d like it,” he called back, “but it may get me in wrong down below.”
After making a complete circle, he landed just where he had intended to, and taxied up toward the hangars. It was a maneuver he had learned thoroughly years before, when he was a cadet flyer—this landing with a dead engine.
Bill’s passenger was smiling as he unbuckled his safety belt and climbed from the cockpit, but there was no smile on the face of the field superintendent who came running up to the plane.
“Hey, what’s the idea, Barlow?” he queried. “You know as well as I do that it’s against the law to loop with a passenger, don’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“You bet it’s right! Then why did you do it?”
“Boss,” said Bill Barlow, showing his sound teeth in a wide grin, “Mr. Saxton here, my passenger, has some red blood in his veins. He offered me five hundred dollars to loop the loop with him. You know that temptation is the one thing I can’t resist, and—well, Mr. Saxon’s got plenty of jack, and if I didn’t do it he’d have found some one who would, and I just happened to need the five hundred very badly right now.”
“Well, I’ve got nothing against you personally, Barlow,” said the superintendent, which was probably true, for very few people had anything against the likable Barlow. “But either I’m here to see that the rules of this field are kept, or I’m not. You fellows are getting too skittish around here. I’ll have your license as a passenger pilot revoked.”
As a matter of fact, he did have Bill’s license revoked. Friendship in private life is one thing; in aviation, as in the army, it is quite another when it interferes with vested authority.