When the period of dull weather was over Don Hale started in with greater zeal than ever. He was doing his best to equal the record of T. Singleton Albert, who had so far recovered his nerve that he had no hesitancy at all in executing the vrille.
By gradual degrees, Don took his machine to greater altitudes, until, at length, he was making the tour de piste at a height of three thousand five hundred feet. Now feeling somewhat like a veteran, he was fully prepared when the order came for him to perform some of the simpler evolutions in the air. One of these consisted in spiraling down to the earth with the engine shut off and landing almost directly beneath the point at which he started. Another was to volplane swiftly downward, and then, while still several hundred feet in the air, bring the machine to a horizontal position and swing around either to the right or left.
These exercises proved to be a pretty severe test on his nerves, and at first affected his head and stomach in a truly distressing manner; but constant practice, combined with a determined will, finally enabled him to gain the mastery over them, and he began keenly to enjoy the great and thrilling swoops through space.
At length there came a time to which he had been looking forward most anxiously, and that was the beginning of his training in a big Caudron biplane, a rather slow but safe machine. This meant that Don Hale’s stay at the École Militaire de Beaumont was nearly at an end.
There were now but two tests before him, one known as the petit voyage and the other the grande voyage. The first was a sixty mile trip and return; the second a triangular journey, each side being about seventy miles in length.
By the time Don had passed these successfully T. Singleton Albert and Victor Gilbert had gone to the great finishing school located at Pau, in the southern part of France.
It was indeed a happy moment to Don when he received his “Brevet d’Aviateur Militaire” from the War Department, which made him a corporal in the French army. This merely meant, however, that he had graduated from the school at Beaumont, and, like the two who had preceded him, was sent to take a course in “acrobatics” at Pau.
Pau, he found, was very delightfully situated, and within sight of the snow-capped Pyrenees.
With even added zest, Don Hale entered into the work before him. It was more dangerous than anything he had attempted in the school at Beaumont; but the tactics he learned were of extreme importance, being precisely those used in air fighting on the front.
About the middle of his course Don Hale was ordered to report to the Mitrailleuse school at Casso, on the shore of a lake, where soldiers in all branches of the army are trained in the use of machine guns. In a two-seater, piloted by another airman, Don Hale practiced firing at captive balloons and moving targets on the lake.