adjustment, and efficiency. The need was
certain; the only question was how the need might be best and quickest
supplied. A good aeroplane, flown by a skilled pilot, could always find
work of the first importance waiting for it on the western front.

The story of the development and expansion of the Royal Naval Air
Service is a different kind of story. As the first business of the Royal
Flying Corps was to help the army, so the first business of the Royal
Naval Air Service was to help the navy. But this business of helping the
navy was a much more difficult and complicated business than the other.
To help the army from fixed aerodromes behind the line of battle was a
dangerous and gallant affair, but it was not difficult. In the ease of
its solution the military problem was child's play compared with the
naval problem. How was the navy to be helped? As early as 1912 a policy
for the employment of the Naval Wing of the Royal Flying Corps was laid
before the Board of Admiralty by Captain Murray Sueter. In this
statement the duties of naval aircraft were laid down; the two first to
be mentioned were: '(1) Distance reconnaissance work with the fleet at
sea. (2) Reconnaissance work off the enemy coast, working from detached
cruisers or special aeroplane ships.' The policy is clear and sound; but
a world of ingenuity and toil was involved in those two short
phrases--'with the fleet at sea', and 'working from detached cruisers'.
Aircraft must work from a base; when they had to work with the army on
land all that was needed was to set up some huts in certain meadows in
France. For aerial work with the fleet at sea the necessary preparations
were much more expensive and elaborate. Sea-going vessels had to be
constructed or adapted to carry seaplanes or aeroplanes and to serve as
a floating and travelling aerodrome. The seaplane itself, in the early
days of the war, was very far from perfect efficiency. It could not rise
from a troubled sea, nor alight on it, without disaster. Accidents to
seaplanes were so numerous, in these early days, that senior naval
officers were prejudiced against the seaplane, and, for the most part,
had no great faith in the value of the help that was offered by the
Royal Naval Air Service.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet well knew the value to the
fleet of aerial observation, but the means were not to hand. The airship
experiment had broken down. Such airships as were available in the early