And so the arguments ran on. But for all the seeming impracticability, Hal’s mind was focused on the experiments with the new type engine with which certain inventors were struggling. It appeared to the boy so much simpler and safer an engine, with its few parts, its more flying hours per given weight of fuel. Not now, but some day—perhaps.
Fuz McGinnis was specializing in wings, not engines. Engines as they were suited him well enough. Quite often though he came in to take silent part in these nightly symposiums held over the ills and blessings of motors. He sat in the discussion for love of the companionship of this oddly assorted trio of thinkers.
As spring came on, Hal went from ground work back again into air flight. He found the routine of flying tests easy, because the inner workings of engine mechanics seemed etched on his very brain. The feel of wings stirred him, roused all the old wild exhilaration of flight. And yet he was more critical of air machinery than in the past. Where before he had been vastly satisfied with the mechanisms of man-flight, he now caught himself wondering continually why man had not made his machines the better to withstand certain shocks that were bound to come in any flying routine. Flying gear had made progress, but landing gear was still crude, still based on land-moving machinery, instead of machinery of the air.
Pondering these things, Hal found his mind working back to the piston-and-cylinder that gave engines their power, their thrust. Why couldn’t this same piston-and-cylinder principle be used to lessen power for a landing gear? His thoughts hung to this strange idea, revolved the thing continually in his mind.
Then one night he set before Weston and Raynor his ponderings and plans.
“It’s the crack and crash of quick landings that break up so many planes.” The boy spread his ideas gingerly before these two experienced old heads, fearing the laugh over some ridiculous flaw that his reasoning might have passed up. “Seems to me man hasn’t got so far in what he lands on! Oh, of course he’s gone a little way, passed from a sled base to wheels, then made the wheels larger and put pneumatic tires on ’em! But at that, any kind of speed landing bangs a fellow with a recoil like a rammed cannon. Now suppose between the ship and the landing gear we had a new kind of shock absorbers—sort of buffers made up of long cylinders with pistons in them, containing oil or glycerine, or some fluid like that, wouldn’t they—”
“Hum—say—yes—”
Raynor and Weston were leaning forward, all absorbed in following this young fellow’s reasoning, this radical plunge into something far out of the ordinary rounds of mechanisms. One piston-and-cylinder principle had been harnessed to a gasoline vapor explosion to hurl a motor forward. Now here was this fellow’s futuristic brain seeing another piston-and-cylinder principle harnessed in oil or glycerin to gentle power and ease a speed plane to the ground in a shockless landing!
Long into the night the three of them discussed the idea from all angles. It was his friends’ advice that he keep his plans to himself—for a while anyway. Then if the right backing ever came along, something worth while might be developed out of the thing. Any dabblings in invention needed money to back them.
Out on the field, Hal went from week to week through the different grades of flying. Although he had done a deal of actual flying before he ever entered the school, the precise, thorough routine training of the Rand-Elwin took no account of this. With flight, as with engine study, he was made to start at the bottom and was then given the “whole works.” He had to begin with learning the controls, pass from that to their application, then to straight and even flying, climbs, banks.