at are most
promising have been obtained.

To those who study aviation, and have done so constantly, say from the
year 1909, one of the most striking signs of progress lies in the fact
that, though unable at first to fly even in the lightest winds, the
aviator of to-day will fight successfully against a 60 miles-an-hour
wind, and will do battle if need be, once he is well aloft, with a
gale which has a velocity of 90 miles an hour. He will ascend indeed,
and fly, in any wind that permits him to take his machine from the
ground into the air, or which the motor of his craft will allow it to
make headway against. And here, though machines are still experimental,
there is removed at one stroke the earliest and the most positive
objection of those who criticised a man's power to fly. When the first
aeroplanes flew the sceptics said: "You have still to conquer the wind,
and that you will never do. Aeroplanes will be built to fly only in
favourable weather, and this will limit their use so greatly that they
will have no significance." But to-day the aviator has ceased, one
might almost say, to be checked or hampered by the wind. If the need
is urgent, as it often is in war, then it will be nothing less than a
gale that will keep a pilot to the ground, provided he has a
sufficiently powerful machine, and a suitable ground from which to
rise--and granted also that he has no long distance to fly.
Wind-flying resolves itself into a question of having ample
engine-power, of being able to launch a machine without accident, and
get it to earth again without mishap; and of being able to make a
reasonable headway against the wind when once aloft; and these
difficulties should solve themselves, as larger and heavier machines
are built.

Apart from the growing skill of the aviator, which has been bought
dearly, science can now give him a machine, when he is in a wind, that
needs no exhausting effort to hold it in flight. Craft are built, as a
matter of certainty and routine, which have an automatic stability.
Science has made it possible indeed, by a mere shaping and placing of
surfaces, and without the aid of mechanical devices, to give an
aeroplane such a natural and inherent stability that, when it is
assailed by wind gusts in flight, it will exercise itself an adequate
correcting influence. To understand what this means it should be
realised that, when such a machine is in flight say in war on a
strategical reconnaissance, and car