One day out on the flying field, Hal stood, neck cracked back, eyes glued to the sky, watching a plane that seemed to have gone mad in the heights. He was sure it was Raynor. He had seen Raynor take off just before. Must be his ship. Yet he had never seen Raynor double-daring death like that before.
CHAPTER X
SAFETY AND DANGER
Far above Hal Dane, Raynor’s airplane shot into a fantastic rolling and twisting and turning, falling like a withered leaf, springing to life and hurling upward, stalling at wrong angles, behaving like some crazed thing of the skies.
Then Raynor volplaned to a beautiful landing, taxied across the turf, got out and strolled over to Hal.
“Now you go up and take a try at that,” he ordered.
“Umph—I mean, sir—oh, sure!” muttered Hal, backing off a little and looking amazed. Had the careful, conservative Raynor gone out of his head?
“I mean it,” said Raynor. Then his eyes began to twinkle. “It’s all in the course. Only you’re not to do it all by yourself the first few dozen times. You’ll go up with me till you get the hang of it from watching.”
Signaling for mechanics to take charge of his ship to give it the regular cleaning and overhauling after flights, he led the way towards the hangars for another machine.
As they walked, Raynor launched into his explanation.
“If a man wants to fly conservatively, he’s first got to learn to stunt. May sound crazy, but it’s a tested truth. It’s a known fact now that a fourth of all the real crashes happen because a fellow got into a tail spin and didn’t know how to get out of it. And the pilots in these crashes are mostly the youngsters, not the veterans. When a flyer has lived long enough with aviation to be considered a veteran, he usually knows by instinct what to do in a spin, doesn’t have to stop and think ‘What button shall I push?’