In the evening we made a night fireworks flight. A series of candles, which when lighted emitted a trail of fire for several hundred feet behind the ship, was attached to each wing. After these candles had burned out, two magnesium flares started burning, lighting up the country below well enough to read a book very clearly. The display was set off by an electric battery in the cockpit.
When the plane reached an altitude of two or three thousand feet, a number of bombs were dropped to attract attention; then the switch was thrown in to start the trails and colored lights, and the ship looped and shunted around the comet-like trail of fire.
Our greatest difficulty in night flying lay in lighting the landing fields from which to operate. Sometimes a number of cars were on the field and I landed and took-off across the beams of their headlights. Under such conditions the ground was well illuminated and landing very simple. On other occasions there would not be more than one car available and in one instance, on a dark night, I took-off and landed by the light of a pocket flashlight which one of the men flashed constantly while I was in the air, to enable me to keep track of the landing field.
At one town in Colorado, we were booked for a fireworks exhibition to be given between darkness and midnight. We had been barnstorming during the day and on our way to this town we ran short of lubricating oil. By the time we had replenished our supply it was too late to get in before dark, and I had never landed at that town before. The owner of the plane, however, was sure that he could easily locate the landing field, even in darkness. He had been there many times and he knew that the field was “right next to the golf links.”
We arrived over the town and after circling a few times, I throttled the motor and shouted “Where’s the field?”
The reply was immediate and full of confidence, “Right next the golf links.”
“Well, where are the golf links?”
“I don’t know!”
I was up against another of the very amusing but equally serious incidents in barnstorming life. We were over strange territory on a dark night and with a rapidly diminishing fuel supply. It was imperative to land within a very few minutes, yet it was not possible to tell one field from another, and even the line fences were not visible.
I flew around until the outline of a strawstack appeared in the field below us. This field was outlined on one side by the lighter color of the pasture adjoining it and a number of trees were discernible along the end. There was no way of telling whether it contained posts or ditches, but we had no alternative, and I landed beside the strawstack in the center.