“Then why didn’t you land the plane with the wind instead of heading into it?” he queried in a perplexed tone.
“All landings must be made directly into the wind, Dad,” Bill explained patiently. “A plane stalls when its speed through the air drops below a certain point. If there’s no wind its speed over the surface will be the same as its speed through the air. But any wind at once affects its velocity over the surface, which will be the composition of the speed of the plane through the air with the speed of the air over the surface. You see, a plane which stalls at forty miles an hour will, when landing into a fifteen-mile wind, make contact at twenty-five miles an hour. The same plane headed down-wind would land at fifty-five miles an hour. And that difference of thirty miles an hour in landing speed might easily spell the difference between a good landing and a wrecked plane.”
His father smiled in the darkness.
“You talk like a textbook, Bill. But you do seem to have learned something at Annapolis during the past year.”
“Learned that in flight training, before I entered the Naval Academy,” replied his son. He ducked his head as an unusually vicious wave swept over the forward decking, deluging the two in the cockpit with stinging spray. “This is going to be a wet vacation, by the looks of things.”
“Who’d have thought we’d be in this fix when we left Key West at four this afternoon! Now we’re stranded—somewhere in the Bay of Florida—and instead of dining cheerily with the Wilsons at Miami, and going on to that important business conference afterwards—”
“We’re likely to make good bait for the sharks in this neighborhood!”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do, son?”
“Not a thing—but grin and bear it until this wind blows itself out.”
“And it will get worse before it gets better!”