e in some very peculiar way; to be men who possessed some
remarkable and hitherto unexplained sense of equilibrium. That these
men would be able to take other men--ordinary members of the human
race--and teach them in their turn to navigate the air, was a
suggestion that was ridiculed. But Wilbur Wright, after a series of
brilliant flights, began actually to instruct his first pupils; doing
so with the same care and precision, and the same success, that had
characterised all his pioneer work. And these first men who were
taught to fly on strange machines--as apart from the pioneers who had
taught themselves to fly with craft of their own construction--made
progress which confounded the sceptics. They went in easy and
leisurely fashion from stage to stage, and learned to become aviators
without difficulty, and mainly without accident.

After this, increasing in numbers from two or three to a dozen, and
from a dozen to fifty and then a hundred, the army of airmen grew
until it could be totalled in thousands. Instead of being haphazard,
the teaching of men to fly became a business. Flying schools were
established; courses of tuition were arranged; certain pilots
specialised in the work of instruction. It was shown beyond doubt that,
instead of its being necessary for an aviator to be a species of
acrobat, any average man could learn to fly.

Certainly a man who intends to fly should be constitutionally sound;
this point is important. When in an aeroplane, one passes very quickly
through the air, and such rapid movement--and also the effect of
varying altitudes--entail a certain physical strain. A man with a weak
heart might find himself affected adversely by flying; while one whose
lungs were not sound might find that his breathing was impeded
seriously by a swift passage through the air. More than one fatality,
doubtful as to its exact cause, has been attributed to the collapse of
a pilot who was not organically sound, or who ascended when in poor
health. And here again is an important point. No man, even a normally
healthy man, should attempt to pilot a machine in flight when he is
feeling unwell. In such cases the strain of flying, and the effect of
the swift motion through the air, may cause a temporary collapse; and
in the air, when a man is alone in a machine, any slight attack of
faintness may be sufficient to bring about a fatality.

A fair judgment of speed, and an eye for distance, are very helpful to
the man