Hal steeled his nerves to try to meet the crash without a shriek.
But even while he held his breath to a sobbing gasp, the ship rolled over slowly and easily into normal flying position, and came to earth with all the grace of a perfect three-point landing.
The rolling earth ceased rolling. Hal Dane sat in a limp daze, like one come back from beyond a veiled, blank interim. Then his senses swept back to him.
So Raynor had known what he was about all the time. It was no accident. Knowingly he had gone into the back-dive and come out with the famous slow roll.
Two weeks after that Hal Dane was doing his own slow rolls, doing his spins and his Immelmanns. He practiced continually, with Raynor coaching him. High over a safe landing field, the pilot showed him all sorts of tricks and dodges, showed him how to extricate his ship from every conceivable position.
Here was carefulness in a new form. The Rand-Elwin School tried to look ahead, to foresee dangers, then to train its flyers to meet that danger capably.
Storm, fog, ice-weighted wings—these were natural adversities that aviators must circumvent as best they might.
But there was still one worse danger—the danger of carelessness.
The instructors strove to teach air-minded youngsters the arts of mechanical safety. In the air courses it was a cause for demerit, for expulsion from school even, for a pupil to fall into some mechanical danger that forethought could have avoided.
A horrible event impressed forever into Hal Dane’s mind the penalty one paid for mechanical carelessness.