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30 YEARS in the AIR
[[Image – composite photo – upper left: two men in early twentieth century airplane, with a man on the left bearing what looks like a machine gun with a large, circular ammunition magazine on the top, while the man on the right is the pilot wearing a rudimentary helmet; bottom: soldier in a World War II era warplane machine gunnery emplacement, standing up at the top of the cylindrical emplacement ready to fire the gun; upper right, a man wearing dress jacket and collar shirt, turns his serious, level gaze at the portrait photographer; caption – "Capt. C. De F. Chandler is shown at top with the first machine gun, a Lewis, used in a plane of the U. S. Army. At this right is Col. Roy T. Kirkland, retired, who was then a lieutenant. The picture was taken early in 1912 at college point, Maryland. Above is the machine gun and gunner in a modern bomber. At the upper right is Maj. Thomas DeWitt Milling.]] 

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Tommy Milling Broke Records As Early Flier
The last of a series of articles
By JAMES T. HOWARD
World-Telegram Staff Writer.
Most of us have forgotten Tommy Milling, proclaimed in 1913 as "the best all-round aviator in the world." Back in the pre-Jenny days, before Glenn Curtiss put the propeller and motor upfront, Lieut. Thomas DeWitt Milling was smashing records right and left in old-style Wright crates, starting a career in Army aviation which continued until two years ago, when he retired with the rank of colonel to live in Denver.

In the beginning Tommy Milling had a complex. He was afraid. A small boy in Louisiana, he was laughed at for his timidity. He avoided rough games and athletic adventures. His father gave him a pony, but he was afraid to ride the animal across a shallow creek.

Modern psychologists might have seen a maladjustment and prescribed a remedy. Possibly not, however, the remedy that Tommy Milling adopted in his early teens when he decided to snap out of it.

Decides To Be Soldier.
His program was to do everything he had been afraid to do before. He went in for pony and bicycle races and he won. He became passionately fond of horses and rode furiously. To the surprise of his companions and the delight of his elders, he emerged a leader. He took up polo. He decided to go to West Point and be a soldier.

But there was no stopping him. Out of West Point in 1909, he wanted the most perilous job he could get in the army. He wanted to show 'em all. And he was bitterly disappointed when he was assigned to Fort Leavenworth — to take charge of the commissary. He was stuck in this dull, safe job for more than a year.

There is no record of Lieut. Milling's efficiency as commissary chief, nor of what steps he took to break away. It may be that someone told the chief signal officer, considering men for the new and dangerous Army air service, that Lieut. Milling was a man with an ambition to break his neck. Anyway, there came a telegram from Washington. Would he be interested in a transfer to aviation?

Were First to Fly.
Down in the Milling household in Louisiana they wondered why Tommy didn't write. When he did, they learned that he was at Dayton learning to manage a Wright biplane. He and Henry H. Arnold, now chief of the United States Air Corps, where the first to fly, now that Congress had decided to finance a permanent air squad. They got their precious wings and their military pilots' licenses on the same day.

Together they went to College Park, Md., first fliers at the Army's first school of flying. Lieut. Roy C. Kirkland had built hangars for four planes and Capt. Charles DeForrest Chandler was on hand as commanding officer. At first they had only two Wright planes. Milling instructed Kirkland while Arnold taught Chandler. The quartet became fast friends, flying together on expeditions which took them as far as 50 miles away. They had forced landings and crackups and they learn aviation science in the bitter school of experience.

Had No Text Books.
"It is almost impossible for the present day flier to envisage the difficulties confronting the student of 1911," says Col. Kirkland, now retired and living at Coronado, Cal. "The pioneer flier could learn practically nothing on the theory of flight before he entered on his training. The practical fliers of that time wrote little or nothing of what they had learned.

"Each student flier, after he had learned to manage his plane in still air, had to learn by experience the effects of strange wind currents, wind gusts and the influence of terrain — he had to do this with no instruments, no straps to hold him in his seat, no parachute and practically no horsepower. The only instruments he had were his eyes, ears and the sense of feel."
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daring against civilians who were aerial veterans compared with him.

It proved a Milling mop-up. He took prizes totalling $7700 in the preliminaries and walked away with the $5000 grand prize for a 175-mile hop over a triangular course to Nashua, N.H.; Providence R. I., and back to Boston. Night fell on the last leg of the jaunt, and Lieut. Milling found himself engaged in his first night flight.

More by guesswork than actual knowledge he steered toward what he thought was Boston. He was
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pounding through the darkness, looking for a smooth spot to set her down, when he saw the flicker of flames. Four huge bonfires had been lighted to mark the corners of the flying field and Lieut. Milling landed smoothly, the only contestant to finish at all.

By 1939 standards, that doesn't sound like much of a flight. But for 1911 it was as daring a venture, as much an aviation triumph, as Charles Lindbergh's historic flight to Paris 16 years later. Milling, too, was a hero who didn't want public
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 acclaim. All he wanted was to show them he could do it. He showed 'em, took his money and hurried back to the safe seclusion of Army life at College Park.

Set Speed Record.
He spent a year at College Park, training more pilots, and in 1912 was sent to Texas City on the Mexican border with four planes to establish another air base. There he achieved his greatest triumph, in 1913, when he flew 224 miles from Texas City to San Antonio in four hours and 23 minutes, with a passenger. His average speed was 68.9 miles an hour.

Of this remarkable feat, Major Gen. W. H. Carter, his commanding officer, wrote:

"The results of this trip show Lieut. Milling to have become one of the foremost aviators of the world." Other less conservative experts hailed Tommy Milling as the "greatest all-round airman in the world."

The "Four Musketeers of College Park" were parted now, but they remained among the lucky 50 per cent of pioneer pilots who were to survive hazardous business of operating the Army's first planes. Gen. Arnold still takes an occasional turn at the controls of 1939 fighting planes. Milling and Kirkland have retired after long careers in the air service.
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Col. Chandler, long the balloon expert of the Army, author of several books on aviation, died last May. In 1912, after the death of two fliers, it was Col. Chandler who coined the slogan, "The conquest of the air must go on."

New Fliers Appear.
The College Park school was moving into its second season in 1912 when another group of young army lieutenants got busy on the west coast under supervision of Glenn Curtiss and two civilian instructors. They started the flying field on North Island in San Diego Harbor, where they threw up rude hangars and lived in tents as they learn to fly two-so-called grass cutters known familiarly as "Julia"  and "Lizzie."

To North Island also came Lieut. Lewis E. Goodier, Jr., whose career as an aviator does not furnish material for a success story. It lasted barely two and a half years and ended in 1914 with this brief item on the news wires:

"SAN DIEGO, November 5.— In a fall of nearly 100 feet today Capt. L. E. Goodier Jr., 27, Aviation Corps, U. S. A., and Glenn Martin, a well known aviator, were badly injured. It was said that both men will recover."

But that isn't half the story. Lieut. Goodier was the first Curtiss student, the first officer to get a pilot's license at North Island.

Crashed Flying Boat.
"And I was North Island's first casualty," he recalls now at his home in Santa Barbara, retired for disability with the rank of major. "It was four days after I got my military aviator rating. We had the first flying boat ever purchased by the army, and I crashed it in the bay. Mr. Curtiss and John D. Cooper, his civilian instructor, came to my rescue in their flying boat. They put me across the bow and taxied back to the hangars. Mr. Curtiss used to say it was the first airplane rescue in aviation. I spent four months recovering from a fractured skull."

In his brief career Major Goodier piled up a surprising number of "firsts," not all of them enviable. He piloted the first explosive bomb-dropping experiments ever conducted in the army, participating with Riley Scott, the inventor, in risky tests of new releasing devices, racks and 50-pound bombs.

Survived Bad Crack-up
"I flew the first Curtiss Jenny (motor and propeller in front) and I believe I got another 'first' by wrecking it," he said. "A rudder wire turnbuckle parted while I was in the air and the loose cable bound itself in the wheel of the control. I could do nothing but turn in one direction. I did that until it was getting over the ocean, so I decided to try a landing.

"Naturally, it was not a straight one, and the wheels dished and the ship started over on its back. I heard the prop splinter as we flopped over. I hung suspended, then released my safety belt and dropped neatly to the ground.

"In November, 1914, I was along with Glenn Martin in a ship he had entered in the army competition. We were making the last test, for slow speed. In making a turn we went into what they say was the first tail spin known. We had but
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Transcription Notes:
Actually the faces on the two flyers look "photo-shopped" (cut out and pasted on photos of the bodies of the flyers?). Different focus and perspective. Here is a cleared version of the photo: https://news.guns.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Lewisinaircraft5.jpg The Lewis Machine Gun: https://www.guns.com/news/2012/10/05/lewis-machine-gun I corrected some typos and deleted a section I could not find in the clipping: "Milling Mopped Up. All this was good enough for his 3 friends, but Tommy Milling was ready to conquer new worlds. Before the summer of 1911 was over he was off to the Boston air meet, a green Army pilot pitting his skill and."