irs;
that, though accidents seemed numerous, and were indeed more frequent
than they had been in the earliest days of flying, they were as a
matter of proportion, reckoning the greater number of men who were
flying, and the thousands of miles which were flown, growing steadily
less frequent.

There was this important fact to be reckoned with also. Each accident
that happened taught its lesson, and so made for future safety. A
considerable number of those early accidents can, for instance, be
traced to some structural weakness in a machine. The need in an
aircraft then, as now, was lightness; and in those days designers and
builders, owing purely to their inexperience, had not learned the art,
as they have to-day, of combining lightness with strength. So it was
that, as more powerful motors began to be fitted to aeroplanes, and
greater speeds were attained, it happened sometimes, when a machine
was being driven fast through a wind, that a plane would collapse, and
send the machine crashing to the ground; or in making a dive, perhaps,
either of necessity or to show his skill, a pilot would subject his
machine to such a strain that some part of it would break.

From such disasters as a rule, greatly to be regretted though they
were, the industry emerged so much the wiser. The strength of machines
was increased; the engines which drove them were rendered more
reliable; and gradually too, though none too rapidly, the airmen who
piloted them grew in knowledge and skill. But all this time, while
flying was being made more safe, there were accidents frequently for
the papers to report; and this was due entirely to the fact that there
were now thousands of men flying, where previously there had been
fifties and hundreds. The public could not realise how rapidly the
number of airmen had grown; that practically every day, at aerodromes
scattered over Europe, flights were so frequent that they were
becoming a commonplace. It was in 1912, as one of its many services to
aviation that the Aero Club of France was able to show, by means of
statistics which could not be questioned, that for every fatality
which had occurred in France, during that particular year, a distance
of nearly 100,000 miles had been flown in safety.

The cause of many of the early accidents was, as we have suggested,
the breakage of some part of a machine while in flight. In an analysis
for instance of thirty-two such disasters, it was shown that fourteen
were