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I was told to try landing with what today we call a "dead stick." A briefing might have helped. Until then, I had never made a bad landing. I had muffed other aspects of learning to fly. I was not prepared for the sensation of gliding through the air without power. It was eerie and the wind whistling through the wires was uncanny. It was a bumpy landing -- on bicycle tires. 

Naturally, I knew some of the oldtimers in flying, inventors, designers, avaiators and newspaper reporters like the late Mrs. Elizabeth Hiatt Gregory who saw some of the earliest flights of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. 

Orville Wright was at College Park when I was there. He had been called there to investigate the cause of a Wright aeroplane accident which occurred the day before I arrived. It was arranged for me to to meet him on a certain day. That day a well known pilot of the time had taken one of the Wright rebuilt biplanes up and was stunting it when he was supposed to be giving it a shakedown flight. Orville Wright happened on the scene. A madder man I had never seen as he made a rush from the field. It was no time for introductions. 

Some people wanted me to fly over Washington during a suffrage parade. I wish I had. I was not afraid of making the flight -- sizable for that period -- but I was afraid of losing my bearings. Geography has such a way of changing when one is in the air. No doubt I could find the Capital and Pennsylvania Avenue, but how about finding College Park or any good landing spot? I was too inexperienced then, a fledgling, in fact. 

Claude Graham White, a handsome Englishman, had flown his Farman biplane into the city of Washington October 14, 1910. In that same manner, Glenn Curtiss had made the first great cross-country flight in America -- Albany to New York with only one stop -- so aeroplanes were not novelties in and near New York City and Washington, D.C. 

So many Washington people were kind to me during those days. One woman, seeing that I was alone, insisted that I share her apartment and her horses. Others shared their cars. They were all so happy and friendly that I have loved Washington ever since. 

And this is my story of demonstrating the Bleriot monoplane at College Park, Maryland, to the United States Army Air Force. May the shadows of the pioneer pilots in the Air Force never grow less. 

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