it
proved worthless, because in a battle in the air the shots of the
enemy are more likely to come from above or at least from levels in
the same plane. The armoured airplane was quickly found to have less
chance of mounting above its enemy, because of the weight it
carried, and before long the principle of protecting an airplane as
a battleship is protected was abandoned, except in the case of the
heavier machines intended to operate as scouts or guides to
artillery, holding their flights near the earth and protected from
attack from above by their attendant fleet of swift fighting
machines. Of these the Vickers machine used mainly by the British is
a common type. It is built throughout of steel and aluminum, and the
entire fusillage is clothed with steel plating which assures
protection to the two occupants from either upward or lateral fire.
The sides of the body are carried up so that only the heads of the
aviators are visible. But to accomplish this measure of protection
for the pilot and the gunner who operates the machine gun from a
seat forward of the pilot, the weight of the craft is so greatly
increased that it is but little esteemed for any save the most
sluggish manoeuvre.

Indeed just as aircraft, as a factor in war, have come to be more
like the cavalry in the army, or the destroyers and scout cruisers
in the navy, so the tendency has been to discard everything in their
design that might by any possibility interfere with their speed and
their ability to turn and twist, and change direction and elevation
with the utmost celerity under the most difficult of conditions. It
is possible that should this war run into the indefinite future we
may see aircraft built on ponderous lines and heavily armoured, and
performing in the air some of the functions that the British "tanks"
have discharged on the battlefields. But at the end of three years
of war, and at the moment when aerial hostilities seemed to be
engaging more fully than even before the inventive genius of the
nations, and the dash and skill of the fighting flyers, the tendency
is all toward the light and swift machine.

[Illustration: Photo by Press Illustrating Service.

_A Curtis Seaplane Leaving a Battleship._]

The attitude of the fighting airmen is somewhat reminiscent of that
of America's greatest sea-fighter, Admiral Farragut. Always opposed
to ironclads, the hero of Mobile Bay used to say that when he went
to sea he did not want to go in an