That requires several months to acquire, but the “Quirk” will be given a useful, though somewhat “short,” course under an expert wireless operator before he is expected to know these things.
At last the great day arrives when he goes for his first trip up aloft. After donning a leather coat, and trousers to match, a skull cap and goggles, he is ready for the fray, and sits himself gingerly beside what at the first seems to him to be a particularly violent and a particularly ill-disposed individual with a simple wonderful flow of language, an instructor in a “box-kite.” Then the engine is set going.
The instructor bawls some remark into his ear, which, for the life of him, he cannot catch. A long and rapid journey across the bumpy ground, a weird sensation of rising into space and he is up in the air at last. Then the machine gets into the “bumps”; she dips, and drops, and sways, first to one side and then to the other, until the poor unfortunate individual begins to wonder if he will ever get safely to the ground again.
There is a pandemonium of noise. The wind rushes by his face at an alarming rate. He feels himself perspiring all over, and particularly in the palms of his hands. He grips the nearest available object, as a drowning man would clutch at a straw. With every fresh plunge and dip he increases that grip.
The instructor shouts at him at the top of his voice, but he hears nothing; only the racing engine and the whistle of the wind. And then for the first time he ventures to look over the side. Could that curiously-scattered collection of pigmy buildings, long, ribbon-like roads, and distant, narrow, gleaming line of railway line be the earth?
He decides that it is, and is at last beginning to feel comfortable, when the machine begins to heel over violently; it is the worst shock that he has yet had. He grips with both hands as tight as he is able, shuts his eyes, and waits for the worst. By the time his eyes are open again the machine--by what seems to him to have been a miracle--has righted itself and is flying smoothly through the air. Never before has the world appeared so beautiful nor so diminutive in size.
For another five minutes or so the instructor flies to and fro above the aerodrome, then down goes the machine, much to the astonishment and alarm of the bewildered “quirk,” who suddenly finds the earth rushing up to meet him. How he fears that moment when a landing must be made, and how relieved he feels when he realizes there is nothing in it in the least degree terrifying.