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months of the war. But the G-4 would have become obsolete for combat by the end of 1915 at the latest. In my time it was used only for training, and the French seemed to have a lot of them.

The maximum speed of the G-4 in level flight was about 60 miles per hour. It had as you can see two motors, and both of them were needed to keep it in the air. In June of 1918 I went for three weeks to a school of air gunnery at Cazaux. There I flew in several types of obsolete French planes, including one, the Farman, that was older and more rickety than the Jaycat. The Farman had been fitted with pontoons to make a seaplane of it. From it I practised firing at targets floating on a lake. 

Neither the G-4 nor the Farman had a fuselage. Instead, each has a structure called the nacelle, shaped somewhat like an oversized bathtub. In it there was a seat for the pilot in the rear and one for the observer in front. 

On one of my early flights at Tours the right motor of our Jaycat failed just after we got well into the air. We were passing over a forest, and the plane began to lose altitude. The pilot managed to clear the trees, but barely. He had to land in a field so small that he could not touch ground in a flat glide. He came down at an angle so steep that the plane bounced and turned a somersault, falling upside down. My seat belt was torn loose and my head struck the ground with considerable force. Fortunately I was wearing a hard leather helmet with a thick lining. When I regained consciousness I was lying on the ground and the pilot was sitting beside me. We were at the outskirts of a village, and several people has gathered to look on. One was a nun who was standing over me and who took charge of the situation. The only other onlooker I remember was a stupid-looking youth who had