“Now if you do this wrong, and the nose drops and the plane starts to spin toward the earth, shut off the engine, put your stick and your rudder neutral, and immediately when they are neutral press the stick forward so that you will get into a straight dive. The plane will then be behaving normally and can be pulled out of the dive in the usual fashion by pulling back gently on the stick and at the same time putting on the engine.”
After this explanation they went up very high to practise vertical turns. There were many other planes much higher than they, and Armbruster called out:
“Kiwi, do you see that little group of tiny specks to the right? That’s a crowd who are going off on a sight-seeing tour to some other planet. Next time they go we’ll go with them, for it’s lots of fun. You fly on and on through space, and the air turns blue and lavender and finally a clear, yellowish white as you approach the other worlds. The pull of gravity gets less and less until you feel as light as a feather and your plane is rocked this way and that by the whirling eddies of air.
“But now, Kiwi, we must get on with our flying practice.”
Time after time Kiwi got into spins whenever Armbruster’s instructions as to the turns were not properly followed. But it was not long until he had become accustomed to the actions of the plane in a tail-spin, and as they were still very high he was able to pull them out.
Armbruster now felt that he had taught Kiwi enough of the art of flying for him to fly alone and to feel perfectly confident. They had flown at times when the air was very bumpy, and although at first it had frightened Kiwi somewhat, he had soon learned to correct for the bumps automatically.
Armbruster knew that after a little practice he could teach Kiwi to loop, which was only a matter of diving the plane until it had attained speed enough to carry itself over the top of the loop. He knew that Kiwi would soon learn to keep enough rudder on to prevent him from falling out of the loop sideways. All the other forms of acrobatics could only be learned by practice after the fundamental things had been thoroughly mastered.
As they landed, Armbruster said:
“Taxi the plane in, Kiwi, and we’ll see if Dad will give you a final test before I send you off solo.”