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LEST WE FORGET

Capt. George M. Dunlap
Route 1
Lake Zurich, Illinois

I hope to again bring before you the unforgetable remembrances of those pioneers of the air. I hope the public shall never forget those pilots and mechanics and many civilians who, by their mistakes or by their accomplishments, helped to make aerial transportation what it is today. In the early days of aviation some people thought a pilot or aviator, as they were called then, was a demigod; some called him a circus clown with no brains; some realized that to fly not only depended on the aviator's nerve but how long he could keep his motor running or the aeroplane to stay together. To fly beyond the limits of a flying field was then considered a daring adventure and he who ventured that far the press of the country called him an intrepid aviator and nothing short of a hero. To fly those early crates required plenty of nerve and skill because the aviator had to find out for himself what his aeroplane could or could not do if he got it up in the air, or to find a way to redesign it so it would do the things that he knew it should do to become a real flying machine.

So, it is because of the many breathtaking accomplishments performed by those early pioneers that I again carry you through the names and deeds of many who gained fame and many who did not, but who all gave in some measure the things required to gain the conquest of the air. When I mention pioneers of the air, I mean those men who did things for aviation before the arrival of such devices as the Tachometer, Compass, Areroid, Barometer, Barograph Angle of incidence indicator and many other improvements in flying technique that came after the year 1913. So I will confine my recollections to the time from 1908 to 1913. To those days when an aviator said to a spectator, "Don't you have any sense running in front of my aeroplane?" To which the spectator re-