The above instruments were to stabilize the plane, to keep it to an even keel in flight mostly. Now came an instrument to help at landing—the visual radio receiver. This consisted of two little vibrating reeds tuned to the radio beacons in use in landing fields. If, in aiming at a landing, Hal turned to the right of his course, the right reed vibrated, while at too much of a left turn, the left reed registered its little movement. So by keeping the two reeds in a balancing quiver, he could fly directly down the path of the beacon to a landing.
True to his promise, Colonel Wiljohn spared no expense in building Hal Dane the finest sky boat that ever flew above land or water. Because the splendid Wind Bird was built for speed, every surplus inch was pared off—and yet because of the dangers she must face, every known safety device was also built into her.
Compared to existing types, the Wind Bird had streamline qualities of an arrow, of a needle! Instead of the old complicated gasoline engine with its exposure of wide air-cooled flanges butt-heading against the wind, the new Conqueror-Eisel engine was a marvel of compactness, and of simplicity. This oil-consuming Eisel engine was fundamentally more reliable than the old gasoline engines, for it was without batteries, and was thus not dependent upon either an intricate electric ignition system, or upon a carburetor system for fuel supply. Separate fuel-injection into each cylinder assured a dependable and uniform supply of fuel—thus constituting in a nine-cylinder, nine individually operated motors in one. And of greatest importance for a vast trans-ocean flight, this new engine could fly a ship one-fourth as far again on the same weight of fuel as any other engine had ever been able to achieve. With an Eisel engine, the great Lindbergh could have flown to Paris, and then have flown eight hundred miles farther—all on the same fuel supply!
Fuel supply can mean life or death in the perils of ocean flight. On his ocean flight, Hal Dane was going to attempt to fly farther than man had ever flown before.
By experimentation, Hal Dane and Colonel Wiljohn tried to figure out and face every danger that the boy could be subjected to on his great flight. They were planning for success, but no explorer can afford to blind himself to possible danger—fog, storm, wreck on the limitless waste of the ocean.
Against that dire chance of being forced down upon the water, the Wind Bird was outfitted with a dump valve that could drop the bulk of the fuel load in fifty seconds. Another protection in case of a wreck on the ocean was a steel saw that would enable Hal to hack off the motors and the steel fuselage, and thus turn the wing into a raft. Within the wing was a compartment to store emergency rations, a still to condense water, a water-tight radio transmitter. Four gas balloons were to be carried to lift the aerial of this transmitter.
Time and again the model of the Wind Bird was sent up with loads greater than ever the real Wind Bird would have to carry on the Pacific flight. During these load tests, Hal found that he would have to redesign the rudder, strengthen the fuselage, fit the plane with stronger axles and wheels.
This was a time of proving and verifying all manner of mechanisms. Continually, the principal features of both the Wind Bird monoplane and the strange rotor-bladed gyroscope were given try-outs on dog planes, as the test planes were dubbed. And continually, “bugs” developed on both types of models. “Bugs” are what the aero-mechanics call those errors that always show up when air-minded inventors begin putting theory into practice. The air is still such an unknown quantity that when mankind tries to enlarge an air machine from a tiny model into a great forty-foot wing expanse, a hundred odds and ends of air troubles immediately develop. This has always been the case. Back in those early experimental days at Kitty Hawk and at Kill Devil Hill, the Wright brothers had to fight the error “bugs” that crept into the enlargement of their models. Those early Wright gliders that flew perfectly in models scaled to inches, proved whole-hearted flops when enlarged to man-sized models. By painful, slow degrees, the Wrights finally mastered the fact that in enlarging a heavier-than-air flying machine, one part can be enlarged to four times its size, while another part of the same model may have to be enlarged sixteen times in order to preserve the air balance.
Hal Dane had the hard-earned knowledge of the Wrights, and of a hundred other inventors to help guide him to air truths. Yet, for all that, his planes were both so radically new in type that “bugs” all their own had developed and had to be patiently weeded out. But ambition drove young Dane harder than any whips could have driven him. There were periods when he bent over his drafting table thirty-six hours at a stretch. The personnel of the Wiljohn Airlines caught the spirit of his vast ambition, and during months of construction, the organization labored as it never had before. Day and night, seven days a week, the work went forward. Out of cloth, wood, and a few lengths of steel tubing grew two structures that differed enormously. The gyroscope idea was developing into a squat, square-looking, heavy-set plane; while the Wind Bird with its streamlined body and vast wing stretch seemed to spell speed, speed!
In periods when he was not needed for drafting or supervision work, Hal Dane slipped away aboard an old plane on some mysterious journeyings. If the facts were known, however, one of those journeys was not so mysterious after all, merely a boy dashing home to see his mother before he undertook a dangerous ocean flight. His other secret missions were flights up and down the Pacific coast where he was trying for the altitude that would best speed him off into the great western river of the winds. From the data that he gathered, the boy made for himself strange, wavy-lined maps and charts of the airways. In addition to these, and based on nautical tables and on gnomonic and Mercator’s charts, he plotted out a great oceanic circle course that was to lead him northwest from San Francisco, up towards the Aleutian Islands, on across the Pacific, and in a final southwest dip along the Asian coast until he brought the Wind Bird down in Tokio, capital city of Japan.