“He’s right, though,” he said. “I do begin to feel like a flier. At first, before I’d ever been up in a plane, I thought I was one—one of those so-called natural fliers, only there isn’t any such thing. Then when I first flew I realized I didn’t know much of anything. Next, when I got so I could handle the trainer pretty well, with the instructor right there, I decided flying was pretty simple after all.”
He sat back and recalled the day that had changed his mind about that.
“But when he finally told me to take it up alone—boy, oh boy! There I sat in that flying machine with no teacher there to hold my hand. That’s when I thought I didn’t even know what direction the stick moved, I didn’t know which way to push the throttle. What ever gave me the nerve to give her the gun and take off I can never figure out. But when that was over and I was still alive and in one piece, I’d got over the worst of it.”
He realized that a submariner had no equivalent of soloing in a plane to go through. He’d have to remember to write that to March.
“After that I straightened myself out,” Scoot’s thoughts went on. “I wasn’t too cocky and I wasn’t too scared. I just knew that I had learned to fly a little bit, that there was still a tremendous amount to learn, and that if I worked hard enough I could learn it and turn out to be a pretty good pilot.”
Scoot was on the advanced Navy trainer now, a fast ship that came closer in speed and maneuverability to the fighters he would eventually fly.
“In another week I’ll be heading for the training carrier,” he said with a glow of satisfaction. “I’ll get my wings and I’ll be a real Navy pilot, but I’ve still got a lot to learn. Taking off from those heaving decks—and landing on ’em again—is going to be quite different from the same moves on these nice flat Texas plains.”
As Scoot thought about it, about the work March had been doing, he realized that there was a great deal in common in their fields. Flying a plane wasn’t much like handling a submarine, but both of them got away from the normal positions of most people. The flier got away from the earth’s surface in one direction. The submariner got away from it by going under. They both handled craft that could travel in a three-dimensional sphere, not just over the surface like a tank or a battleship.
“March practices coming up with a Momsen Lung,” Scoot told himself, “while I practice coming down with a parachute. That Lung’s just a sort of underwater parachute.”
A plane was just a vehicle to get explosives into position for firing at the enemy and so was a submarine, Scoot concluded. And sometimes they even handled the same explosives—torpedoes!