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Not only is Foulois claimant to the title of the world's first, and perhaps only, pilot by correspondence but he also considers himself the first pilot to "black out" in an airplane flight. While flying at about 40 miles an hour at 600 feet over farm land in Texas in 1910, Foulois would often find himself getting drowsy and almost overcome. this feeling came, he noticed, when he was flying a particular course. Investigation showed that the cause was he onion fields over which he was flying. The aroma of the onions from the fields would rise and, like true Texas onions, the odor was powerful enough to render the pilot almost unconscious.

The shooting of movies away from a sound stage can present difficulties in varying degree. Leroy Grumman, seated behind the desk in the office of his Bethpage, Long Island, plant, appeared to be in one of the more ideal locations. However, somehow, through the intricacies of electronics, the hum of a welding machine crept [[image]] into the circuit into which the movie sound equipment was hooked and it took a full hour of detective work before the Grumman electricians could trace the offending are welder and temporarily silence it while the pioneer builder of naval aircraft told of producing the first shipboard plane with retractable landing gear. 

No amount of small difficulties in shooting the film could offset the one unexpected advantage - the uniformly fine performance of the actors. William Boeing, founder of the famed company which bears his name, has always been a retiring person who avoids public appearances. He has been active in aviation for more than 15 years. Yet he agreed to tell the story of the beginning of the air mail in this country and, seated on the porch of his home high in the mountains outside of Seattle, he performed in a warm and easy manner.

Digest by Sikorsky
As the cans of film began to mount it became apparent that one of the real tasks in making the movie was going to be to digest in some cohesive form the stories that each man had to tell. Igor Sikorsky provided on the the most graphic demonstrations of condensation in his turn before the cameras. As a man whose career in aviation started six years after the Wright brothers' first flight, he might very well have required several installments to tell of his vital contributions to aviation. Sikorsky took exactly ten minutes to trace his career including such highlights as his design and development of the world's first four-engined airplane in 1912, his ocean-spanning clippers of the 1930s and, of course, the modern helicopter he fathered.

After six months of shooting from Boston to Los Angeles, with stops at points along the way, there were almost 100,000 feet of 35mm film in the cans. This film represented the recollections of 41 men of aviation. It included the men who built the airplanes, men who had flown them and other men who had contributed o aviation as specialists. These men were the representatives not only of themselves but of thousands of others who had contributed the furtherance of the aviation art.

The writing of the script involved the projection of the warm and [[image]] easy anecdotes and recollections of he aviation pioneers against the full story of aviation and the times in which it developed. From the sound track of the personalities filmed, a transcript was compiled. It amounted to more than 400 typewritten pages. The approach was admittedly unorthodox. It was perhaps the first time that a movie script was written after the actors had spoken their parts.

The framework of the film was clearly apparent. The airplane had come from Kitty Hawk to Muroc, from cloth to titanium. To tell the story of how it had gotten there, and where it had been on the way, was the job the men had achieved in their unpretentious recollections. Less than one-tenth of the material collected on film and on sound track was used in