AFTER MY FIRST “SOLO,” 1921
CHAPTER III
MY OWN PLANE
IN the war some students were soloed with as little as four hours’ training. That meant they were considered competent to go up in their planes alone after this amount of instruction. Obviously these were exceptional students. In civilian flying, ten or twelve hours, I imagine, would be about the minimum training. But these hours usually mean simply routine instruction in straight flying, comparable to the novice driving his automobile along the level uncrowded country highway. For the automobilist beginner the problem comes when he first meets traffic, and a big truck, say, suddenly cuts in ahead of him. Can he handle the emergency, or will he crash? And what will the beginner do when his car, or the other fellow’s, skids on the wet pavement for the first time? The answer is that good driving results from experience and the requisite of having met many varied situations.
And so with planes. Straight flying is, of course, the necessary basis; but it is the ability to meet crises, large and small, which counts. And the only way to train for that is, as I have said, to have actual instruction in stunting and in meeting emergencies. To gain experience after the beginner has soloed, and while he is at home in a plane he knows intimately and upon a field familiar to him, he should play around in the air for four or five hours alone, practising landings, take-offs, turns and all the rest of it where he is perfectly safe and can come down easily any time.
Then he should have three or four more hours’ instruction in emergency situations. This feature is too often overlooked. As I visualize it, the beginner should go up with an instructor with dual controls again and should get himself into—and out of—one scrape after another, including forced landings. After he has done so repeatedly, he will have confidence and a real feeling of what must be done, and done instantly, under any given set of circumstances. More of this sort of follow-through training and there would probably be fewer of the accidents which too often are beginners’ bad luck.
I had rolled up the tremendous total of two and one-half hours’ instruction when I decided that life was incomplete unless I owned my own plane. Those were the days of rather heavy, under-powered ships which lifted themselves from the ground with a lumbering effort. The small sport planes were just beginning to appear, most of them in experimental stages. The field where I flew was owned by W. G. Kinner of the Kinner Aeroplane and Motor Corporation, who was then developing one of the first sport planes made.
I watched that plane at work in those days when I was cutting my aviation eye teeth. Little by little I became able to distinguish the different makes of planes, and the finer points of their performance. I realized that the small plane took off more quickly, climbed more steeply, was faster and easier to handle than its bigger brothers with their greater horse power and wing spread.
After two and one-half hours I really felt myself a competent judge of planes! A few hundred solo hours since then have modified greatly that initial self-confidence! The fact that wise pilots with a thousand hours or so warned me against this little fellow, influenced me not. I wanted that sport plane that hopped off like a sandpiper and actually seemed to like it. And I set about buying it. My pilot friends came to me quietly. “Look out for the motor,” they said.
Power was the thing, they assured me, and the paltry 60 horse power of the little Lawrence air-cooled motor simply didn’t measure up to commonsense requirements. It is interesting to realize that the plane in which Lady Heath made her famous solo flight from Croydon to South Africa and back, the lovely little Avian which I bought from her, actually has little more horse power than this first love of mine.
