He took off all right. He roared across the field, and if he didn’t sound quite like a gull, he looked the part. He rose into the air for all the world like a giant gull. He pulled off in a steep climb, and the wise men wondered if again they were proved wrong by an ignorant fanatic.
Their wonder didn’t last long. When Bonny tried to level out, he nosed over and dove straight into the ground, like a gull diving into the ocean for a fish. We rushed out to the wreck. Bonny was quite dead. There was scattered around him not only the remains of his own gull wings, but thousands of the feathered remains of other gull wings. He had dived straight into the shallow grave of all the gulls he had killed.
[COB-PIPE HAZARDS]
Silly little things are apt to crack you up sometimes.
I did an outside loop at Akron once. I came up over the top of the loop and started right down into another. I didn’t want to do another, so I pulled back on the stick to stop it. It wouldn’t come all the way back. It was jammed some way.
The ship was nosing steeper and steeper into the dive. I rolled the stabilizer, and that enabled me to pull the nose up. I couldn’t keep it up if I cut the gun more than halfway. I knew I would have a tough time landing like that. Besides, although I had a chute, I knew that when I got down low to make a landing the stick might jam even farther forward and nose me in before I had a chance to jump. Or the engine might quit down low and do the same thing. It wasn’t my ship, however, and I didn’t want to jump and throw it away if I didn’t absolutely have to.
I tried the stick a few more times. Each time I yanked it back hard it came up against the same obstacle at the same point. I decided to take a chance that it would stay jammed where it was.
I came in low ’way back of the field with almost all of the back travel of the stick taken up, holding the nose up with the gun. I had to land with the tail up high, going fast. I bounced wildly, used all the field, but made it all right.
I made an immediate inspection to find out what had jammed the stick. I couldn’t imagine what it was because I had taken all the loose gadgets out of the ship before I had gone up.