lloon. The labours of the pencil and the pen are not easily carried on
in the basket of a captive balloon: it swings and twirls in a breeze,
and very often produces air sickness. This form of instruction was
relieved by an ascent in the airship _Gamma_, and by occasional trips in
free balloons.

Towards the end of April Captain H. R. M. Brooke-Popham took over from
Captain Fulton the command of the old aeroplane company on Salisbury
Plain, and on the 13th of May, when the Royal Flying Corps was formed,
this company became No. 3 Squadron of the new formation. No. 2 Squadron
was formed from the nucleus of aeroplane pilots at Farnborough, and was
placed under the command of Captain C. J. Burke. In August the Central
Flying School was started at Upavon, with Captain Godfrey Paine, R.N.,
as commandant.

The airship company at Farnborough, being lineally descended from the
old balloon school, became No. 1 Squadron of the Royal Flying Corps
Military Wing. The command of this squadron was given to one of the
earliest of aeronautical pioneers, Captain E. M. Maitland, who, almost
alone among the pioneers, preferred the airship to the aeroplane. Edward
Maitland Maitland, after being educated at Haileybury and Trinity
College, Cambridge, joined the Essex Regiment as a second lieutenant in
1900. He served in the South African War, and in the spring of 1908
turned his attention to ballooning. On the 18th of November in that
year, along with Mr. C. C. Turner and the late Professor A. E. Gaudron,
he ascended from the Crystal Palace in the _Mammoth_, a balloon of more
than a hundred thousand cubic feet in capacity, supplied by the
enterprise of the _Daily Graphic_, and travelled in the air to Mateki
Derevni in Russia, a distance of 1,117 miles, which was traversed in
thirty-six and a half hours. His main interest was not in Russia, but in
the air, and he returned to England at once. When in 1919 he accompanied
the airship R 34 on the first famous air voyage across the Atlantic, he
remained in America for only a few hours. During the years 1909 and 1910
he was attached to the balloon school at Farnborough, and carried out
aeroplane experiments at his own costs. He piloted a Voisin biplane in
1909 at the Doncaster meeting, which, because it started the day before
the Blackpool meeting, may be called the first flying meeting in
England.

In August 1910 he flew a Howard Wright biplane at Larkhill when there
were only two other machines t