machine which will run swiftly along the
ground but cannot rise. It is no easy trick at first, to control the
"penguin" and keep its course direct. Then he will try the "jumps"
in a machine that leaps into the air and descends automatically
after a twenty to forty yards' flight. As Darius Green expressed it
so long ago, the trouble about flying comes when you want to alight.
That holds as true to-day with the most perfect airplanes, as in
boyhood days when one jumped from the barn in perfect confidence
that the family umbrella would serve as a parachute. To alight
with an airplane the pilot--supposing his descent to be voluntary
and not compelled by accident or otherwise--surveys the country
about him for a level field, big and clear enough for the machine to
run off its momentum in a run of perhaps two hundred yards on its
wheels. Then he gets up a good rate of speed, points the nose of the
'plane down at a sharp angle to the ground, cuts off the engine, and
glides. The angle of the fall must be great enough for the force of
gravity to keep up the speed. There is a minimum speed at which an
airplane will remain subject to control. Loss of speed--"_perte de
vitesse_," as the French call it--is the aviator's most common peril
in landing. If it occurs after his engine is cut off and he has not
the time to start it again, the machine tilts and slides down
sideways. If it occurs higher up a _vrille_ is the probable result.
In this the plane plunges toward the ground spinning round and round
with the corner of one wing as a pivot. In either case a serious
accident is almost inevitable.

In fact the land is almost as dangerous to the navigator of the air
as it is to him of the sea. To make good landings is an art only
perfected by constant practice. To shut off the engine at precisely
the right moment, to choose an angle of descent that will secure the
greatest speed and at the same moment bring you to your landing
place, to change at the most favourable time from this angle to one
that will bring you to the ground at the most gentle of obtuse
angles, and to let your machine, weighing perhaps a ton, drop as
lightly as a bird and run along the earth for several hundred feet
before coming to a full stop, are all features of making a landing
which the aviator has to master.

In full air there are but few perils to encounter. All airmen unite
in declaring that even to the novice in an airplane there is none of
that sense of d