The Brighton boys lived every hour at that big base airdrome. Jimmy Hill was sent up on his first practice flight on an English machine. Joe Little got his chance at the end of a week. He was sent up one morning in a late-type bombing machine, a huge three-seated biplane with great spreading wings and a powerful engine. This was a most formidable looking machine in which one passenger sat out in front mounted in a sort of machine-gun turret. The big biplane was fast, in spite of the heavy armament it carried, its three passengers and its arrangement for carrying hundreds of pounds of bombs as well.
Harry Corwin was in the air at the same time on an artillery machine, the car or fuselage of which projected far in front of the two planes. There, well in front of the pilot, the observer sat in a turret with a machine-gun. Machine-guns were also mounted on the wings, and a second passenger rode in the tail with another rapid-fire gun.
As Bob Haines had been on a rather long flight that day on a Nieuport, a fast French biplane, and his observer had told Bob of a new French dreadnought machine carrying two machine gunners and five machine-guns, the boys talked armament long into the night.
Every day they learned some new points. One afternoon a pilot from the front line told of a captured German Albatros, which he spun yarns about for an hour. A single-seater, armed with three machine-guns which, being controlled by the motor, or engine, shot automatically and at the same time through the propeller in front of the pilot, with the highest speed of any aeroplane then evolved on the fighting front, with a reputation of being able to climb to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet in less than fifteen minutes—-some said in so short a time as ten minutes—-the crack German machine had attracted much attention.
"With that sort of thing against us," said Dicky Mann, "we have certainly got to learn to fly."
The same thought may have come to their squadron commander that night, for the next day saw the start of real post-graduate work in flying for his command. The rule at the base airdrome had been to give new units of well-trained flyers good all-round tests on various types of machines. This involved straight flying for the most part, and was done more with the idea of familiarizing the newcomers with the newer types of planes, and deciding for which branch of the work they were best suited, than for anything else. In the work that gave the finishing touch to his command, their squadron commander selected three of the six Brighton boys as candidates for high honors in the days to come. Every one of the half dozen was good. All were eager. All flew well. But Joe Little, Jimmy Hill and Harry Corwin seemed made of exactly the sort of stuff from which flying stars were evolved.
"I think I will try to make hunters out of those three boys," said their commander to the officer in charge of the base airdrome.
"Our plan here," said the officer thus addressed, "is to pass youngsters out after they have satisfactorily gone through a final test of two short voyages of twenty-five miles each, two long voyages of one hundred and thirty-five miles each and an hour's flight at a minimum altitude of sixty-five hundred feet. The post-graduate course is mostly aerial acrobatics. Looping the loop comes first. All of them can do that. The flier must then do flip-flops, wing slips, vertical twists and spinning nose dives."
"Just what do you call a spinning nose dive?" asked the squadron commander.
The chief explained: "Climbing to at least four thousand feet, the pilot cuts off his motor and crosses his controls. This causes the machine first to scoop upward and then fall sidewise, the nose of the plane, down vertically, spinning around and around as it falls."