Suddenly the roar above grew louder, and he stopped to watch. Three lounging pilots looked upward, and the swarm of mechanics on the line quit work entirely. When King Forell was flying there wasn’t a great deal accomplished on McCook Field.
The little scout shot downward, motor wide open, in a terrific dive. Two, three, four thousand feet it dropped like a bullet. As it swooped out, barely five hundred feet above the ground, Forell fairly stood it on its tail. It bored its way upward a full half mile in a few seconds. At the very top of the climb it arched over, as if to loop, but as it got upside down it turned slowly on its horizontal axis. It ended up on an even keel, without jerkiness or hesitation, and instantly went into another one of those breath-taking dives.
“Boy, what ships!” Finley was thinking, as he saw the single-seater flashing earthward at a speed of more than three hundred miles an hour.
Duralumin construction, even to the aileron controls, all-metal prop, capable of a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour on the level. What King was doing would not have been possible two short years before.
For this time King scraped the ground as he came out of that bullet-like dive, and again the ship was darting almost straight upward. But this time it was turning in a two-turn-upward tailspin.
“There,” reflected Finley, “is the best acrobatic pilot I ever looked at. By the same token, he’s a bird that’s so far from being wise to himself that he’ll ruin his chances if he don’t look out. He could be a great guy in the service, if he doesn’t spoil his own chances!”
He moved slowly toward his ship as the “Kink” went into a continuous series of stunts. Barrel-rolls, half-rolls, loops, spins, falling leaves, upside down spirals—the whole gamut of aerial maneuvers was accomplished without loss of altitude or a second of rest between stunts.
And young Forell, less than two years out of West Point, was more of a flyer than showed up there right then, Finley admitted to himself. There wasn’t a test pilot on the field who could come down after flying a new job and analyze its performance as well as the Kink. Finley’s own ability to recommend changes in big ships’ construction which would improve them, was Forell’s on the scouts, and there was no reason why, with further experience, he shouldn’t be a whiz on any old plane at all. Every wire and strut and spar, every eighth of an inch of span or chord, every degree of incidence or dihedral—all had their message for the brilliant youngster, and his recommendations on new jobs had been uniformly accurate. They were thinking, Finley had heard, of sending him to Tech for a four year course in aero-dynamics and design. Well, they couldn’t pick a better man.
“If only he wasn’t such a pup. Shame, too,” Finley thought to himself.